Six Ways to Improve Your SEO Ranking

I do not claim to be an expert in SEO ranking, however, after 15 years of doing this, I have learned one or two things. The SEO game continues to change, but some basics need to be done.

1) Create Quality Content

Seems pretty darn obvious to most folks out there, but let me tell you it isn’t to a lot of folks. Don’t just rehash crap you have read. Show an opinion, show you have ideas and don’t go with the herd. Don’t be stupid about it, but if you agree with everyone else, then why would anyone want to read your stuff?

2) Stay on Topic

If your site is about a specific topic, Stay on topic! Yes, occasionally, after success, you can add your favorite guacamole recipe or whatever, but stay on topic. I was guilty of wandering off-topic, and it has cost me repeatedly. Why would anyone read your stuff if you can’t stay on topic?

This site exists because my Personal Finance site was riddled with technology stuff, and nobody wanted that. Stay in your lane.

3) Make it fast

Nobody will wait for it to load if your site is slow. People have no attention span these days, so don’t overload your site with crap that slows it down. Better still, use something to cache it and optimize the caching settings, too.

Google cares about this a lot too.

4) Make Your Key Content Easy to Find

Anything you think is good or important should be no more than one click from any page that a user browses. If you make things easy to find, people will find them more easily (think about that one for a minute).

5) Get links and make good links

For God’s Sake, don’t carpet bomb sites asking for Guest Posts and Links. I get inundated with that crap and I ignore it. People who I know that are successful just ignore them. Make contacts, but you aren’t going to make good contacts on cold-call emails.

6) Social Media

Seriously, I must put that one down? OK, here is a little more stuff, if you are using Social Media, SEPARATE your personal and business feeds. If you want to get up on your pulpit about a personal cause, do you want it to be associated with your site?

7) HTTPS – Get a Site Cert

If your site does not have an SSL cert, go get one. Many folks won’t go near a site without one, and if you are going to sell something you MUST get one. It makes you look like you are trying hard too.

8) Get your site Crawled

Set yourself up on Bing, Google and whatever other search engines you can think of so they crawl your site to find your great content! Install Yoast SEO , Rank Math or something like that, and it is automatic. They aren’t going to look for you, there is too much content these days, you have to tell them about yourself. Search on sitemap.xml and go from there! You need to set up a Sitemap.

9) Learn how to count!

Yeh, that is important too. I hate list posts, so I did this mostly as a gag (i.e. more than 6 points). Lean how to make sure your content is concise and easy to read. If you have a thesis, better put a sharp precis at the start or folks aren’t going to read 10,000 words.

Page Rank Articles

• Back to Page Rank 4 (Nearly Complete) Back in the days when Page Rank was published by Google, we all fought hard to keep a good ranking.
• Another Page Rank Slap Down from Google Yup, our amigos at Google have decided that The Canadian Personal Finance Blog is contravening their rules, and thus it has been slapped back down to Page rank lower.
• Page Rank 5 Again? So somehow THE Canadian Personal Finance site is back to a Page Rank of 5 with Google.
• Page Rank of 2/10 A Page Rank used to be something that Google told folks about, but now it is a stealth value.
• With Page Rank Comes Great Income Since my Page Rank has stabilized around 2 I have been getting more advertising opportunities which is a good thing. 
• Page Rank Back to Three In the good old days of Google, Page Rank was an actual number, and it was a fluid number, which changed often.
• Please Reconsider My Page Rank Mr. Google? Found an excellent article talking about a way to have Google reconsider your site’s Page Rank (in Blog about Your Blog) .
• Page Rank Zero Yet 7000 Links to Home Page? I am bewildered and confused by Google’s alleged Page Ranking System. 
• Page Rank in the Crapper Yup, after all of my careful work to make sure that most of my articles link from my blogspot site to my new site,
• Six Ways to Improve Your SEO and Search Engine Optimisation is the answer. I’m not sure what the question was, though.
• And, many, many more!