Resources - Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking

The methods employed to increase search engine rankings can be involved and very technical. However as a semi proficient HTML editor, there are ways you can dramatically improve your search engine ranking. It takes time and persistence but the yield is well worth it as you know.

At least 85% of people looking for products and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. That is why it is so important to not just be listed but ranked highly. With over 90% of those searchers not progressing any further than the first couple of pages you have to be right on top. The higher you are ranked to more visitors you will receive and the more visitors the more conversions your site will achieve.

Title Bar

The title bar is the blue bar of the web browser (such as Internet Explorer or FireFox). This is also commonly used as the title in the search result pages. It is vital that the title has your keywords in it and also attracts searchers attention making it more likely to be clicked on.

A bad title would be:

‘Realworks’ or worse still ‘Home Page’

A good title would be:

‘RealworksMedia.com - Website and Graphic Design for Essex and London’

You can change the title by editing the following HTML:

<html>
<head>
<title> Title goes here </title>
</head>

<body>

All your titles for each page should be different and should target different keywords. This will ensure that you rank highly for lots of different keywords. Having titles that represent the content of your pages will help in your conversation ratios by providing lots more targeted traffic.

Content

Content is important because search engines actually read the words on your website and determine what your website is about. Now if you have a website that is about renaissance art then including ‘renaissance art’ where ever possible in the text will greatly benefit your search rankings.

Remember however that like the title, it is important to have a high density of keywords but the visitor to your website must also be able to easily read your text.

The text on your site is essential to search engine rankings. After all the free information on a website is exactly what most of your visitors are going to be looking for. So make sure it is relevant and has a high density of keywords.

Click here further reading about Website Content.

Meta Tags

Meta tags used to be very important in search engine rankings, until everyone caught on of course. Currently they play little part in most of the major search engines. However lots of the smaller search engines still use them and they are quite often used for the result descriptions by the major players. Meta tags should still be used and used properly because you just never know when the search engines are going to change tact.

Your meta tags can be found in the <head> tag and should be edited using the same guidelines as your page title.

For example, a meta tag would read:

<html>

<body>

Link Popularity

When Google was in its first stages of development it was called back rub, named so because it analyzed the back links into a particular information resource to establish its popularity and relevance to a particular search term.

Now every major search engine uses the back links of a site to determine its relevance to certain keywords. Here is how it works

Lets take our renaissance art example again. If our renaissance art site is linked to from other sites, that is great, however if it is link to from other sites about renaissance art that is even better.

So sites that are relevant to yours are strong sites to ask for links from.

The site that is linking to you should also be ranked highly by the search engines. If a quality resource is linking to you and it is relevant to the content on your site, this will have far greater impact on your own rankings than a random link from any old website. Indeed just spreading your seed with anyone can be detrimental to you search engine rankings. If the search engines think that the sites that link to you are link farms you may even risk being black listed by the automatic algorithm.

To check your back links try this great tool at Market Leap.

Finally links to your website that are not reciprocated will hold higher value than reciprocated links. The logic behind this is that if a webmaster willingly links to your site, they must deem it high quality. However reciprocal links do not give a strong indication of how high the quality of a site is. They just show the webmaster has spent a lot of time developing there links.

Reciprocal links are not a bad thing so long as they are between two ethical sites. Link partners are valuable in that they refer traffic to your site (which also helps rankings) and do have some value to search engines, just not as much as none reciprocal links.

Summery

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Just remember that the search engines are only interested in providing the most relevant content for their searchers. If they don’t provide good results searchers will stop using them and that means they lose revenue though advertising, etc. Search engines will not rank your site at all if the algorithm determines that you are using ‘unethical’ tactics, such as keyword spamming.

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