| The methods employed to increase your
search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided
dealing with this issue. I am here to tell you - the time has come to face your website! A
high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest
desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid
this issue.
At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on
the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea
of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers
to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes
up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website.
That's what search engine optimization is about.
You can immerse yourself in all the technical information
available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings.
Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most
likely see improved rankings quite rapidly.
The first item you should examine is the title bar on your
homepage.
The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page.
Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search
engine rankings, the words on your homepage's title bar should include the most important
keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.
Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on
the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the
most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long
strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than
once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.
The next item to put under your microscope is your website
content.
Search engines generally list sites that contain quality
content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most
important keywords - the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines
to find your site.
Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is
not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want
to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search
engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not
graphic format.
To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your
cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML.
If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your
webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine
rankings.
Next we come to what is called meta tags.
I know this sounds like something out of science fiction,
but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high
search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it's worth
adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.
To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must
access the code. To do this, click the "view" button on the browser menu bar,
and select "source." This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code
that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the
window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name="keywords" content=. If
you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not
do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.
Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity.
This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of
search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your
website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your
links page.
If you type in "free link popularity check" in a
popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your
site. In the case that there aren't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that
are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity
campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they
exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the
websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your
search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.
Search engine rankings are extremely important for a
successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine
optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you
can't boost your rankings yourself. Don't ever ignore this all-important factor in
Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality
customers will be directed your way. |
