When it comes to SEO, everyone wants to be number one and they are willing to go to great lengths to get there. As a result, supposed SEO experts have made a killing by exploiting the search engines.

I'm certainly not disputing the value of a higher page rank. However, many SEO experts are doing a terrible disservice to their clients by neglecting a website's content. Because of this, many highly-ranked sites are not only useless but terribly designed and incapable of capturing a visitor's attention.

Once a business decides to focus on increasing its search engine rank, it should consider making a few moves on its own, prior to hiring an SEO expert.

A large factor in page ranking is the number of backlinks a website has, which are essentially links into the site. A business should never attain backlinks through spam or paying for some sort of link exchange service. The best way to create backlinks is through helping people.

By helping people, I mean joining a forum that is related to the business's industry and participating in discussions by offering meaningful comments.

Business owners should make sure that their signature contains the business's URL, which will create a valid backlink on a page that is directly related to the business website's content. The same goes for blogs and comments. If a business owner or representative offers useful dialogue, they have a chance to really increase their company's search engine rank.

Other great ways to increase page rank is through blogging and by getting listed on all of the major search engines.

Search engines love fresh content, which is why everyone with a website should create a blog section and post at least once a week. Of course, it is also very important that a business website is included in all major directories, including Bing, Yahoo, Google, and Ask.com, as well as others that may be specific to the businesses industry.

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With the rise of social media sharing and advances in search engine optimization techniques, many web users now bypass a business's home page and land directly on product pages and blog posts. As a result, first impressions at all entry points of a business website are essential to reducing bounce rates.

Business owners often confuse bounce rates and exit rates. A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that hit a page and don't visit any others within the same website. Exit rates refer to the percentage of visitors that leave a site from a given page.

A website that has a high bounce rate is making a bad first impression. A bounce rate of less than 30 percent is good, but websites with a bounce rate of 60 percent or higher have a problem.

There are a number of ways for businesses to decrease their bounce rate percentage.

A good website design with keyword integrity will surely help to reduce bounce rates. A good website design isn't only pleasing to the eye, it promotes ease of use. As for keyword integrity, everyone recognizes that keywords are important, but they should be used properly with content that is useful and engaging ' not stuffed.

Other ways to lower bounce rates include fast-loading web pages and careful external link building. External links act as exit points for users and can certainly drive up a bounce rate.

Lastly, we make sure that our clients use social media to its full advantage. Sharing links on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites can offer a rich experience with images, user-input and friend-tagging. Businesses can utilize these platform-specific features to enrich a visitor's experience.

Copyright 2010 dzine it, inc. internet marketing All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.