Increase Your Search Engine Ranking

The means used to augment your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have likely 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 really succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to steer cleer of this issue.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet locate websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to appeal to targeted customers to your site who are likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the larger the traffic that is steered to your website. That's what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to learn how to optimize your web pages to get higher rankings. Or you can look at several basic items on your pages, make some slight adjustments, and most likely see augmented 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 raise search engine rankings, the words on your homepage's title bar should include the most essential keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.

Then click on all your links and inspect the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should include 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 usually list sites that contain quality content rather than entertaining graphics. The text on your site must contain the most vital keywords- the words that viable customers will be typing into search engines to locate your site.

Aspire 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 accomplish a high ranking on search engines, this text is important. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

To figure 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 likely in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to raise your search engine rankings.

Next we come to what are known as meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is truly 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 discover if your page is set up with meta tags, you must get the code. To do this, click the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select "source." This will open up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page.

If there are meta tags, they generally 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.

Finally, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is very vital in terms of search engine rankings. Nearly all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the worth 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 poor search engine rankings, think about launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this includes contacting quality sites and asking 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 augments your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are very vital for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and employ a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the fundamental steps listed above, and see if you can't increase your rankings yourself. Don't ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Keep in mind, the greater your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be steered your way.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Schwartz, is the founder of Promotions Unlimited,an Internet legal directory (CA, TX & Las Vegas ) publisher and search engine placement technology analyst.  You can contact Bob via e-mail at  seo711@gmail.com or visit his San Diego legal directory at:  http://www.sandiegolawyerforyou.com/special.htm