How To Increase Your Search Engine Ranking

[Nelson Tan]

The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem
like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with
this issue. I am here to tell you—the time has come to face your
website! A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential
that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your
business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue.

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
home page.

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 metatags. I know this sounds like
something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code.
Many people believe that metatags 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 metatags
in their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with metatags, 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 metatags, they usually appear
near the top of the window. For example, a metatag 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.


Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download
$347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com