The two most important things that search engines look for when determining how to rank your website in their search engine results pages (SERPs) are content and backlinks. Volume of content and quantity of backlinks count, but, the quality of the content and the backlinks count even more.
Content
There should be plenty of content at your website that talks about all aspects of your products and services. “How to…” and “Top 5 Tips for…” articles/posts recieve particular attention, so, include plenty of those in your website. Content should be added frequently, so, sit down and write up a list of topics that you can write about. Then add an article/post about one of those topics as often as you can. Adding content is a way of telling the search engines that the website is current (unlike those that you have seen that were created 4 years ago and nothing has changed, including the copyright date).
Backlinks
Backlinks are the links TO your website. To find out who is linking to your website, go to Google and Yahoo and type link:www.yourwebsite.com -site:yourwebsite.com into the search box. A list of websites that link to your website will display – excluding the links within your own website (-site:yourwebsite.com). You need to use both Google and Yahoo because they use different parameters, so, will yield similar, but different results.
Now, do the same search using the website address of a website that is listed above yours in the SERPs (link:www.competitor.com -site:competitor.com). Research the websites that link to that website to determine whether you want to be linked to by those websites. Are they quality websites?=high value. Link farms?=low value. For the websites that you would like to link to yours, do what it takes to get those websites to link to you as well.
Tips
- To test which websites link to a particular page in your website, type link:www.yourwebsite.com/specificpage.html -site:yourwebsite.com in the search box.
- A link to your website from a .edu trumps a link from a .com