Improve your Google ranking (2011 edition)

One of the best ways to boost your Google ranking also happens to be one of the trickiest: getting other sites link to you. In a way, it’s tricky for a good reason… it’s hard to do, but it generally ensures genuine results from Google’s point of view. To further toughen this process, it’s not just any old website that can link to you – the more relevant, the better.

For example, if you own a coffee shop and your brother’s car-mechanic business links to your website, it’s not going to do much good in Google’s eyes. In fact, it may even have a negative effect (although Google doesn’t release their indexing and ranking formula – for good reason – so I guess we’ll never really know).

However, if a bunch of people write good reviews on their blogs and provide inbound links to your site, it will then rank better in searches for “coffee shops” in a certain area. Each industry is different, too – coffee shops tend to go un-researched. If you’re driving around town and you feel like a coffee, you’ll probably stop at the first cafe you see and buy one. Other industries are often different & people tend to research products first, with many people using the internet to do so.

So how can you stand out? We go back to our golden rule: getting others to link to you. And remember – it has to be relevant, as per the coffee shop example. Get your suppliers to link to you, get your customers to link to you (offer a discount for services if you have to – a relevant link is worth so much more if you think about it) but make sure it’s relevant.

Ask your customer to include a link somewhere on their site or in their blog along the lines of “We use XYZ cleaning company in Sydney”. This provides relevancy, because the link-text contains both the business type (cleaners) and the location (Sydney)… that’s +2 points right there!

If you’d like to learn more about boosting your Google ranking or developing in-bound links to your website, please get in touch.