A high search engine ranking for your website is essential that if you to get the most you can out of your website.
At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through the main search engines 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 amount of traffic that is directed to your website. That’s what search engine optimization is about.
We like to start with a few simple items on your pages, then make some small adjustments, and most likely we’ll see some improvement to rankings.
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 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 to seven 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 the microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than 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, want 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. Meta tags 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.
We look at the source code to check this. If you would like to find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you can 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 content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, once again you’ll want to ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.
The last issue we come to is 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. Whatever you do don’t sign up for a linking program that promises hundreds or thousands of links for a cheap price. Those types of programs can hurt your search rankings beyond belief.
Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. If you are not comfortable with some of the processes we’ve discussed then contact us to review your site for you. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.
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