Tuesday, 10 November 2009 22:01 Written by Pascal Jarry

It's no secret that any company wanting to succeed on the web needs a  positioning plan in order to come out on top of search engine results. Having a well structured website with interesting content is, of course, a prerequisite for selling products or services on the web but this alone is not enough to be successful and put you ahead of the competition. I often use the following analogy in my e-marketing course I teach at the SAJE in Montréal: an entrepreneur pays for smart new business cards, he puts then in his new cardholder on his desk and sits back, waiting for the phone to start ringing - he will wait a long time. In order to succeed he needs to get out and network; he needs to talk up his business at every opportunity and had out his business card to everyone he meets. The same principal applies to the web: the website is the business card and search engine positioning is the virtual networking. For all of you who have a website, here are a few tips to help you increase the number of visitors to your sites.

Let's start with the theory. Referencing groups together the technical and marketing activities aimed at increasing the overall visibility of a website. Positioning in search engines, such as Google, is done in three steps. The search engine first  analyzes the skeleton of the website (webcrawling), the it analyzes the content in its entirety (indexing) and finally it looks for and classes the pages corresponding to the keywords requested (searching). There are two types of referencing; organic referencing and  pay per click referencing. I will cover pay per click referencing in future blog. Today let's concentrate on organic, or free, referencing which consists of positioning a website 'naturally' at the the top of the list of search results, without paying for the privilege.

Everyone dreams of coming out on top of the list of organic search results .. it takes a lot of time and effort to get there and the position is highly coveted. It is like a formula one race; there is always someone in your rear-view mirror waiting for an opportunity to overtake.

Here are 5 tips to help you improve your position.

Keyword strategy. Define 10 words or phrases that potential clients would be likely to type in a Google search to find your website. The results should list you as well as your competitors. If you don't find your competitors alongside you there are 2 options: you completely missed the mark with your search keywords, or you are about to become rich!

Review the content of your website and integrate keywords. Keywords should appear in the titles, the meta elements (page descriptions), URLs etc. You should use these words everywhere you can. Use a tool such as http://keyworddensity.com/ and compare with your competitors websites that are positioned higher than yours .. all will become clear!

Use lots of cross references within your website. Hyperlinks rank highly with Google so you should put your keywords as hyperlinks. A good technique is to place your keywords in your menus and to have several menus that lead to the same pages. Analyze the HPJ Solutions site: there are the tabs at the top, the same sections presented below the scrolling window and the menu at the bottom. In each case we re-use the same links - our key words as hyperlinks.

Use backlinks. Google has revolutionized search engines by giving a weighting to the sites it indexes. The famous Google PageRank is based on the links between all of these websites: it thinks that the number of hyperlinks pointing to your website is a measure of the quality of the content of your site. If there is a hyperlink to your website on a really popular website, such as cbc.ca for example, you will be taken much more seriously by Google and they will place you higher in their organic positioning. The principal is to have as many links as possible on as many sites as possible. At HPJ Solutions we have a team dedicated to to creating backlinks for our website positioning campaigns.

Know and understand search engine positioning.
- Know your PageRank - http://www.prchecker.info
- Know the sites that reference your site,
  Simply type links :www.yourwebsite.com in Google and it will list the sites it knows that reference your site,
- Know your Alexa position http://www.alexa.com and compare with your competitors,
- Follow the positioning of your keywords in an Excel spreadsheet - for each keyword, note the Google positioning each month.

So there are a few tips. There is so much to say on this. In a future installment I will talk about the audience analysis tools, such as Google Analytics and WebMaster Tools, that are offered free by Google. Knowing the origins and the behavior of the visitors to your site is also fundamental for improving your search engine position. The question you should always be able to answer: How many people visit your site each month?