5 Simple Ways to Improve your Ranking on Google a la Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki is the opening keynote on Friday am at the Extravaganza. All attendees will get a copy of APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur, his latest book. As the former Chief Evangelist for Apple computer and author of multipleNY Timesbestsellers, he knows books, authoring and publishing. Be there. If you are an author who wants to be serious successful … you will be at the Extravaganza. No excuses allowed.

Here’s his Five Simple Ways to Improve your Ranking on Google a la Guy Kawasaki …

Sear In fact, Google is too smart for most “black hat” marketers. On average, Google changes their algorithms over 500 times a year. Why do they do this? Well, mostly to make sure that websites that are focused on content farming and other black hat SEO tactics don’t climb up the search engine ranking.

Last year Google implemented changes which are now being referred to as the “Panda” update. What this did is go after content farms and the like, lowering their ranking by up to 90 percent. What are content farms? Sites that are focused on high volume, low-quality content. These sites often try and sell AdWords on their pages to game the system and make money that way. Google is always on the lookout for these types of sites and unfortunately during this update, bigger and respectable sites like Suite101 and EzineArticles got hit hard, too. If this story concerns you, and it should, keep in mind that you likely won’t become a site like Suite101 unless you are singularly focused on content aggregation.

If you’re ready to boost your site up in the search ranking, here are a few tips to help you do that:

1       It’s not about you: Your website is not about you, it’s about your consumer or end-user. Google’s singular focus is to make sure websites are focused on the user. Make sure that your site is focused on your consumer/reader. What does that mean? It means that you need to take yourself out of the equation and really, really make sure your site is all about the people you are targeting.

2       Links, Links, Links: You want to get links, but not just any links. You want links from high traffic, high quality sites.

3       What’s on your SERP? What does SERP stand for? It means Search Engine Results Page, and if you’ve never looked at yours, you probably should. This is the page that shows content from your home page, generally the first three lines or so. If the first paragraph on your home page is just about you, and not about your reader, it will not only affect your ranking but your clickability as well so again, keep this focused on the reader.

4       Keywords and title tags: While many of us are focused on keywords, most of us ignore title tags. What are title tags? They are what your page name says at the very top of your search bar. You should be using keywords in this area, which will help with your search engine ranking.

5       Site updates & ad space: I love our APE blog, and it’s really helped with our search engine ranking. Why? Because search engines love fresh content and every time you update your website, it tells the search engines that you’ve added new content. But one thing you won’t see on our blog are ads. Why? I don’t care for them, particularly on our site, and I don’t think they monetize enough for me to consider adding them. Also, too much ad content can lower your ranking in Google.

Getting a higher ranking in Google isn’t that hard, but it does take time. There is no such thing as overnight results or ranking and for sites who subscribe to this, they often find their site disappeared or was “sandboxed” by Google. The secret really isn’t a big secret, but basically it’s this: keep your site current and relevant. If you have a website that’s focused on your consumer, you update the site via your blog, and you spend time doing some helpful link building, I can almost guarantee you’ll see your website go from page 54 to page 1 – and wouldn’t that be great?

Guy’s words–all smart; all insightful. Don’t miss him next month. As he said to me last week, “Do you want be to give a great talk on self publishing … or do you want me to blow their heads off.” What do you think I responded?!

Tomorrow, Tuesday the 9th, is the last day to get the reduced Early Bird rate for the Extravaganza via the website. Wednesday, the 10th is the last day to get the reduced rate at the hotel. Get ye there pronto.

Judith Briles is known as The Book Shepherd (www.TheBookShepherd.com), an author and book publishing expert and the Founder of Author U (www.AuthorU.org), a membership organization created for the author who wants to be seriously successful. She’s been writing about and conducting workshops on publishing since the 80s. Judith is the author of 30 books including her latest, Author YOU: Creating and Building Your Author and Book Platforms.
Join Judith live on Thursdays at 6 p.m. EST for Your Guide to Book publishing on the www.RockStarRadioNetwork.com.
 Follow @AuthorU and @MyBookShepherd on Twitter and do a “Like” at AuthorU and TheBookShepherd on Facebook.  If you want to create a book that has no regrets, contact her at Judith@Briles.com