How to Increase Your Search Rankings?

SEO involves getting lots of moving pieces coming together in the right way to form a perfect storm of sorts, which equates to better search results for a Web site. Beyond SEO best practices, I draw some "non-SEO" ways that can help support the SEO process and increase the search ranking.

1. Enhance Web Site Usability

Site design must be aimed with simplicity above all else, with as few distractions as possible and with very clear information architecture and matching navigation tools. If sites aren't human-friendly, they are usually even more unfriendly to search engine spiders.

Typically, enhancing usability also involves improving the information architecture of a site, which of course will help the site to be more easily spidered, and will often increase the potential for solid anchor text-rich internal linking.

2. Work with Other Marketing Teams

Many SEO projects fall victim to "marketing-in-a-vacuum." SEO teams should work together with other marketing teams to ensure the same message being delivered offline is incorporating its way into the site's visible text. Also, not combining efforts with the paid search team is a top way to miss out on search ranking opportunities.

It often takes extra "pushing" to become involved in other marketing efforts, or at least well informed of future planning.

3. Incorporate Traditional PR Efforts into the SEO Plan

Press releases should be optimized to help the company Web site(s) perform better within search results. Again, this calls for involvement by the SEO team, especially in the distribution of the article and in the placement of properly structured hypertext links within the article to relevant pages on the Web site.

4. Monitoring and Leveraging Communities

Every industry has an online community of some size. Some industries -- such as travel in particular -- have literally thousands of forums and blogs talking about deals and experiences. Savvy marketers can leverage these platforms by becoming an active participant -- without being "spammy" or invasive -- and gain traction within rankings as a direct result of this community participation strategy. Additionally, there's lots of user-generated content about products and services in these communities, providing both invaluable feedback for refinement of current offerings and services, as well as an excellent base for R&D efforts.

5. Keep Content Fresh by Updating it Regularly

For some organizations, content is hard to update on a regular basis. For example, a company that sells one type of widget that never becomes obsolete may seemingly have no reason to update its content. However, the majority of sites on the Internet could benefit from updating it regularly, you can see the website below: http://www.richforth.com

Bottom line: if the content seems like it's "getting stale" from your human perspective, imagine what a search engine that crawls it every month may feel.

Even if you've never done SEO, chances are that improving and updating your content can help you to gain rankings for terms that will drive traffic. Although this can be argued -- especially for competitive industries -- the core of the belief is certainly sound. There are sites out there that have simply followed best practices by including important content in tags, and maintained rankings and traffic simply due to keeping the content fresh.

Keeping these five factors in mind when thinking beyond traditional SEO best practices will likely yield long-term success in terms of driving organic traffic.