5 Tips to Improve Search Rank

Optimizing your website for search engines can be a time consuming and costly process if you don't know what you are doing. Utilize these five search engine optimization tips provided by a professional SEO firm to improve your organic search engine rank.

1. Watch Your Keyword Density

Keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword is used on a web page compared to the total amount of words on the page. For example, if your web page is 100 words long and you use the keyword "SEO" eight times on this page, the keyword density of the search term, "SEO" would be 8%. When writing content for your website, be sure the keyword density of your content never exceeds 15%. The density you should use varies from source to source, but 15% is generally the highest density any source will suggest.

2. Build Relevant Links

Building links to your website is a time consuming process that is absolutely necessary for high search engine rank. If you don't build links to your website, your search results will reflect with low rankings. However, you should also pay attention to where you are placing your links. The quality of the websites that contain links to your website is taken into account by search engines, as is the relevancy of the website and the web page to your website and your web page. Relevancy is very important. If you're just spamming up unrelated websites with links to your website, search engines are going to catch on and lower your search rank.

3. Use Headers on Web Pages

It is common to see new webmasters bold their headlines and increase their size so that consumers will be sure to notice them. However, there is a much better way to make your headlines, titles, and subheadings visible to consumers, which will also improve your search engine rank. Headers, such as H1, H2, H3, and so on, are used to not only make headlines stick out for consumers, but headers also alter the size of the headlines according to their natural order in the article.

Headers should be used appropriately. While the keyword in the H1 heading will be viewed as the most important header by search engines, it is not savvy to place more than one H1 header on a web page. You can, however, use multiple H2, H3, and so on. Most web pages only get to H3, but try to make it to H6 if possible, without looking like a spammer.

4. Reduce Web Page Loading Time

If your website loads very slowly, consumers are likely to leave your website before they find out why they should stick around. Your website may have images that cause your page to load slowly. Other factors include the amount of code on your website, such as javascript; excessively large web pages or even a slow server can slow your website down as well. For your initial step, you will need to test the loading time of your website, which can be done for free on our website.

5. Write Your Own Content

Copying content is just plagiarism. It wasn't okay in 8th grade and it isn't okay on the internet. Search engines store every web page they come across, so if you copy content from another website and place it on your own website, your search rank is not likely to improve very much. You may see a slight improvement due to an increased amount of content on your website, but this improvement will pale in comparison to the results you can obtain with unique content. If you are not the "writing type," hire a search engine optimization firm to write your content for you.

Andre Zayas is a professionally syndicated author. Houston Search Engine Optimization