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.
Michael Rasmussen is a successful Internet Marketing Consultant
and author of many top-selling eBooks. Michael has been
marketing online since the early days and he knows what it takes
to make money and succeed online. Stop by his Web site and
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