Increasing your search engine ranking for your website does not have to be an impossible task available only to computer experts. If you have avoided trying to rank your website in the search engines, I am here to tell you that if you want your business to succeed online it is essential that your website ranks high.
More and more consumers are looking for a product or service online and they find them through the three big search engines being Google, Yahoo and MSN. The idea of SEO (search engine optimization) is to make your website more palatable to the big three and hence get you some more sales. The better ranking your website has with the search engines the more targeted traffic you will get to your website. More targeted traffic equals more sales.
Just look at your own online searching, when you search for anything online do you ever search past page 2 of the results Google finds for you. I know I don't even go past page 1.
You can study all the whiz bang technical optimization techniques out there on the market and believe me there is a lot, every man and there dog will tell you how to get your website to page 1. Before spending a fortune online to get your site optimized you might want to do a little tweaking yourself, if that is too much please contact me with any questions and I would be happy to help.
First off you can look at some simple adjustments on your website which if changed correctly most likely will result in improved rankings. Now take a look at the title bar on your homepage.
Appearing at the top of the page is the title bar. When you access your home page you should see some words that appear there on the browser tag. To improve your search engine rankings the words that appear here should be the most relevant keywords or phrases for your business. Including your company name is an excellent idea, just remember title should make some sense and not just a gaggle of keywords , the search engines want relevancy more than anything else.
You should do this for each page of your website, each title bar on each page should include the most relevant keywords and phrases for that particular page. Make sure your keywords used in the title bar for each page also appear within the content of the page as well.
Try to avoid a whole heap of keywords, a good idea is to have 8 or less keywords. Remember more is not always better. Don't repeat keywords more than once in the title.
The second item you should examine is your website content, you may have heard that with your website rankings "content is king" and yes it is. Search engines will generally list sites that contain relevant content to the users query than a whole lot of pretty pictures and graphics, so make sure your site has relevant content.
To make your content relevant you should use your 1-8 main keywords that you have chosen and fit them into the content of your website/webpage, these are keywords that your customers will be typing into the search engine to find businesses just like yours. Aim to have around 250-500 words on each page, aim for a 1% keyword density if you write 500 words of content for a particular webpage aim to mention your keyword 5 times. Remember a page has to look pleasing to the eye or your customers will not stay around long enough to buy. To achieve the higher ranks with your website the search engine "spiders" must be able to read your webpage content, make sure that your content is written in HTML form and not graphic form.
If you try and highlight the text on your website and you can highlight it and copy and paste into say notebook then the text is HTML, if you cant then it is probable in the graphic form.
Next step in our quest for that elusive page one ranking is what is called META tags. I know this is sounding all technical and very hard but if you follow these directions you can have a better optimized website that hopefully will lead to more traffic and sales.
Many people believe that META tags are the key to high ranking pages within the search engines, but in truth only have a small effect but still worth having, as every little bit counts.
To find out what your META tags are bring up your website and in your browser go to the view button and then to source code this should show you the code that makes up your website. Meta tags will usually appear near the top of the code and will say metaname, meta description, meta keywords or something to this effect. If you cant locate this code get in contact with your web designer and ask them to put them onto your site. It may not increase your rankings hugely but any small bit helps.
Last but not least we come to link popularity. This is an extremely important factor in increasing your websites ranking. Link popularity is the number 1 way the search engines will rank your website. Link popularity is based on the number and the quality of links you have linked to your website.
Type in "free link popularity check" in one of the big 3 search engines, they will come back to you with what sites are linked to your webpage. In Google you can type" links:"your URL" and it should come back with any links connected to your site. If you would like more information on getting links added to your site please send me an email and I can show you how to get all the links you need to increase your search engine ranking.
What this means is that you contact other quality sites that are related to your business in some way and request that they exchange links with your site. This requires a little leg work, you need to find out if it is worth linking to a particular site and how that site ranks in the search engines. Linking to popular quality sites not only will increase your own search engine ranking but it will direct more quality traffic to your website which in turn will generate more sales.
Search engine rankings are a necessary step in any internet marketing campaign so before you go out and spend an absolute fortune on an optimization company try to do some of the above steps yourself.
Remember to succeed online you can never ignore this all important factor in online marketing. The higher you rank in the search engines the more customers that will come to your website.
For those that are having trouble trying their own optimization out please register here for more information Or drop me a quick email with any questions and I will be happy to help as I can.
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