Increasing Search Engine Ranking

A high searchengine ranking for your website is so essential that if youhave the slightest desire to actually succeed in yourbusiness, there is no way you can continue to avoid thisissue.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services onthe Internet find websites through search engines such asGoogle, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pagesfor high search engine rankings is to attract targetedcustomers to your site who will be more than likely to makea purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engineresults, the greater the traffic that is directed to yourwebsite. That's what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all the technical informationavailable online to figure out how to optimize your webpages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a fewsimple items on your pages, make some small adjustments,and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. Thefirst item you should examine is the title bar on yourhomepage.

The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page.

Look at the words that appear there when you access yourhome page. To increase search engine rankings, the words onyour homepage's title bar should include the most importantkeywords or phrases, one of which would include yourcompany name.

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars onthe pages you access. Each title bar on every single pageof your site should contain the most important keywords andphrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid verylong strings of keywords, keeping them to six words orless. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the titlebars, and make sure that identical words are not next toeach other.

The next item to put under your microscope is your websitecontent. Search engines generally list sites that containquality content rather than scintillating graphics. Thetext on your site must contain the most important keywords- the words that potential customers will be typing intosearch engines to find your site.

Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this isnot desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a highranking on search engines, this text is essential. However,the search engines must be able to read the text, meaningthat the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take yourcursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are ableto do this, the text is HTML. If the text will nothighlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case,ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format inorder to increase your search engine rankings.

Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know thissounds like something out of science fiction, but it isreally just simple code. Many people believe that meta tagsare the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality,they only have a limited effect. Still, it's worth addingthem in the event that a search engine will use meta tagsin their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you mustaccess the code. To do this, click the "view" button on thebrowser menu bar, and select "source." This will pull up awindow revealing the underlying code that created the page.

If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top ofthe window. For example, a meta tag would read: metaname="keywords" content=. If you do not find code thatreads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. Thismay not do much for your search engine rankings, but anylittle boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is afactor that is extremely important in terms of searchengine rankings. Almost all search engines use linkpopularity to rank your website. Link popularity is basedon the quality of the sites you have linked to from yourlinks page.

If you type in "free link popularity check" in a popularsearch engine, the search engine will then show you whatsites are linked to your site. In the case that therearen't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sitesthat are linked up have low search engine rankings,consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially,this entails contacting quality sites and requesting thatthey exchange links with your site. Of course, thisrequires checking out the rankings of the websites you wantto link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not onlyboosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs morequality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for asuccessful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go outand hire a search engine optimization company, try takingsome of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can'tboost your rankings yourself. Don't ever ignore thisall-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, thehigher your search engine ranking, the more qualitycustomers will be directed your way.