Top 2 ways to improve your search engine rankings

I could have added a top 10 list, but really there are 2 major things that improve how well your site does in a search engine.  In the past, web developers would use any means necessary to get their results at the top of the list, know as "Black Hat Search Engine Optimization."  This would include repeating phrases, or creating invisible text to try to game search engine relevancy.  These days, search companies like Google have gotten more intelligent in the way they index content and determine relevancy of content.

Google has a ranking system called Page Rank that uses extremely complex algorithms to determine relevancy.  Although they will not give away too many details of their algorithm (for fear of everyone gaming the system), they do give you guidelines to improve your site to make it more search engine friendly.

Quality Content

Cut the fluff, and write quality content for your site.  A lot of web design companies are guilty of adding fluff to their content and also to their client's content.  People want to read about your product or service, not read every buzz word known to man.  Search engines care about the quality of your content, and how it can help others to increase their knowledge as well.  Fluff and marketing mumbo jumbo does not do that.

Referral Links

Your site looks pretty darn important when thousands of sites are linked to your content.  Search engines see these links and determine your content as very relevant to a large number of people, hence see it as quality content.  Social networking sites are so incredibly successful because they have tons of links, and thousands of people link to them.  

There are hundreds of other factors that can affect your site's search engine results, but I thought I would mention the top 2 that really matter to companies like Google.  Change these 2 things, and you will see yourself increasing your relevancy to search engines, improving your search engine rankings, and ultimately driving more traffic to your site.

I hope you enjoyed this brief SEO article.