Advisors always ask me; “How can I move up in search engine rankings on Google?” The only way to guarantee it (for specific keywords) is to pay for your position with pay-per-click ads, but here are a few things that will really help. But don’t tell the competition! Much of the information here is based on a 2007 study about ranking in Google from SEO moz.org.

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag

The number one factor in ranking a page on search engines is the title tag. These are the words in the source of a page in <title> and appear in the blue bar of your browser. Choose the title of an article very carefully. AdvisorFlex™ 2.0 Websites will automatically use the title of the article in the title tag (what appears in the blue bar), which is very helpful.

2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link

Anchor text appears underlined and in blue (unless it's been styled) for a link from one web page to another.

Try to get some inbound links to your articles using the keywords you want to be ranked for. Two ways to do this are through online press services such as PRweb.com or simply by networking. Watch the Plain English Demo.

3. Global Link Popularity of Site (PageRank)

How many pages are linking to your page is called link popularity, or in Google, PageRank.

The more sites that link to you, the better. AdvisorFlex™ 2.0 Websites contains a Content Management System (CMS) that helps you add content quickly and easily. Create one quality content page per week. This is where an Advisor-Blog™ might really help you out. Quality content is the most important factor to getting inbound links. For a site that will perform well, you eventually need 200-odd pages of content. Other than pay-per-click, Quick SEO is dead! So don’t be sold by SEO guarantees. The only way to perform well in SEO now is to have a rich content site.

4. Age of Site

When was the domain of the site registered?

There's nothing you can do about this, but there is evidence that suggests that how long you have your domain registered makes a difference (spam sites are not registered for long). If we are managing your website and domain we take care of your yearly registration for you. If not go ahead and extend your domain registration for a couple years. If you don’t know where your domain is at you can do a “WHOIS Search” at any of the main domain registration companies.

5. Link Popularity Within the Site

This is the number of links to the page from inside your own domain. Because of #2, it's critical that you link to articles from within your site using the right anchor text.

6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links and Popularity of Linking Site

It's important that you get quality inbound links. This means they have to be from a site that is topically related to yours and one that has a high Page Rank. As a client of MIAGD we submit your site to all the major search engine directories through moz.org. If your site is not with us, you should go there and add it.  Type "related: www.yoursite.com" into Google and contact the top 20 returns for links.

7. Link Popularity of Site in Topic Community

This is where an Advisor-Blog™ might really help you out. Network with others in your topical community and target market. Make sure you frequently link to other blogs in your topical community as well.

8. Keyword Use in Body Text

You need to make sure you have a high keyword density of the phrase you are optimizing for in the content of the page.

Place targeted keywords in the first and last paragraphs. Here’s a trick, write your quality content and then go to http://www.ranks.nl to find the keyword density. Then, take the top three words and add them to the meta keywords in the parameters part of the page (in your AdvisorFlex™ Control Panel). To do this; Login > Article Manager > Click the Article > Open the Parameters window on the right side. This is somewhat backwards for some maybe, but it optimizes a page for what you actually wrote, rather than making you write a page optimized for certain words (which I always find difficult).

9. File Size

The file size doesn't seem to influence the ranking of a web page on Google, although smaller sites tend to have slightly higher rankings. Optimized images will really help.

10. Clean URLs

Keywords in the page or file name (URL) are important. When we build your AdvisorFlex™ 2.0 Website we replace organic page URLs (like ?id=123) with keywords that make sense for that page (like yourdomain.com/about/our-investment-philosophy.html) NOTE: Look at the URL for this page in the address bar at the top of your browser.

This also means you should save documents like PDFs with file names that make sense prior to uploading them to your website.

Helpful Keyword Tools:

Ranks NL

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Word Tracker Keywords

Digital Point Keyword Tool

SEO Book

Pay-Per-Click Marketing

Google AdWords

Yahoo! Sponsored Search