The methods used to improve your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science, which is probably why you have avoided dealing with them. But the time has come to face your website. A strong search engine ranking is so important that, if you want your business to succeed online, you cannot keep putting this
issue aside.
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 purpose of optimizing your pages for higher search engine rankings is to bring targeted customers to your site—people who are more likely to make a purchase. The higher your page appears in search engine results, the more traffic is directed to your website. That is what search engine optimization is all about.
You can dig through all the technical information available online to learn how to optimize your web pages for higher rankings. Or you can start by reviewing a few simple items on your pages, making small adjustments, and quite possibly seeing improved rankings fairly quickly. The first item to 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 improve your search engine rankings, the words in your homepage’s title bar should include your most important keywords or phrases, including your company name.
Next, click through all your links and review the title bars on the pages you visit. Every title bar on every page of your site should include the most important keywords and phrases from that specific page. However, avoid long strings of keywords. Keep them to six words or fewer, avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure identical words are not placed next to
each other.
The next item to examine closely is your website content. Search engines generally list sites with quality content rather than flashy graphics. The text on your site should include the most important keywords—the words potential customers will type into search engines to find your site.
Aim for around 250 words on each page. If that does not work with your design, try to include at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, search engines must be able to read it, which means the text needs to be in HTML rather than graphic format.
To find out if your text is in HTML format, use your cursor to try to highlight a word or two. If you can highlight the text, it is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In that case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format to help improve your search engine rankings.
Next, we come to what are called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they have only a limited effect. Still, they are worth adding in case a search engine uses meta tags in its ranking formula.
To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you need to access the code. To do this, click the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select "source." This will open a window showing 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
looks like this, ask your webmaster to add it. 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 an extremely important factor in search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites linked from your links page.
If you type in "free link popularity check" in a popular search engine, the search engine will show you which sites are linked to your site. If there are not many sites linked to yours, or if the sites that are linked have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this means contacting quality sites and asking them to exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking the rankings of the websites you want to link with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only helps boost your search engine ranking, but also sends more quality traffic to your website.
Search engine rankings are extremely important to a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above and see if you can improve your rankings yourself. Do not ignore this important part of Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.
