Search Engine Ranking

Posted on : June 17, 2007

The business of getting your website up the search engine rankings is a serious one, and can make all the difference in the level of exposure your site gets. To a business looking to advertise and sell online, a good search engine ranking can, quite literally, be the dividing line between success and failure. Yet, it’s surprising how often website owners and company webmasters neglect the basics of optimizing your search engine ranking. Here are a few simple steps for getting your site up the rankings, and a couple of things to avoid.

The most basic step is to ensure that your website contains plenty of keywords for the search engine robots to find. But this, in itself, is more of an art than perhaps you might think. What keywords should you go for? This is where research can come in handy. There are a number of web tools that can help you find the most popular keyword searches within your own specialist field of business. Have a look at similar websites and businesses – even competitors – and look to see what key phrases they are using to get noticed by the search engine ranking robots.

Don’t just pick a single keyword, such as “medicine,” and stuff your website full of uses of that word, because your website will not move up the search engine rankings that way. The only way to get your site noticed is to select certain carefully chosen phrases, ideally of between two and four words, which reflect your best idea of what people who are interested in your website or product might search for.

Where to put keywords in your articles and web pages? The key phrases you have identified will benefit by being placed not just in the body of the text, but in your headings as well. Insert your keywords within the title tag – this is your “headline,” if you like, so make sure that it is appealing to a human reader, not just a robot! Once you have used a keyword or keyphrase in your title, repeat it throughout the body of the text on your web page – enough times to be noticeable, but not so frequently that the sense of your text is compromised in any way. After all, it’s all very well to attract traffic to your website, but if visitors see content which is clearly designed to appeal to search engine rankings rather than human readers, they’ll be off just as quickly as they arrived.

You should also use the same keywords as anchor text to link to that page from other pages on your website – the more pages the better. This will greatly improve your site’s visibility for search engine ranking purposes. In addition, use alt tags and title tags – these are the tags that cause descriptions to appear when you hover your mouse over images or text links. Using these tags is good web practice anyway – making sense of links to users who are using text-only browsers or having problems loading the images on your site – but more to the point for search engine ranking purposes, your images will show up on search engines much more readily, giving you another valuable source of ranking “visibility.”

Finally, here’s a word of caution. When submitting your site to a search engine, do so yourself, rather than using an automatic submission service or program. Using such software is against the terms of use of most major search engines (including Google), and if you do use it, your site may be blocked from the index and your attempt to move up the search engine rankings will be right back to square one.

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