Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking

The methods employed to increase your search enginerankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you haveprobably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here to tellyou - the time has come to face your website! A high searchengine ranking for your website is so essential that if youhave the slightest desire to actually succeed in yourbusiness, there is no way you can continue to avoid thisissue.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services onthe Internet find websites through search engines such asGoogle, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pagesfor high search engine rankings is to attract targetedcustomers to your site who will be more than likely to makea purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engineresults, the greater the traffic that is directed to yourwebsite. That's what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all the technical informationavailable online to figure out how to optimize your webpages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a fewsimple items on your pages, make some small adjustments,and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. Thefirst item you should examine is the title bar on yourhomepage.

The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page.Look at the words that appear there when you access yourhome page. To increase search engine rankings, the words onyour homepage's title bar should include the most importantkeywords or phrases, one of which would include yourcompany name.

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars onthe pages you access. Each title bar on every single pageof your site should contain the most important keywords andphrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid verylong strings of keywords, keeping them to six words orless. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the titlebars, and make sure that identical words are not next toeach other.

The next item to put under your microscope is your websitecontent. Search engines generally list sites that containquality content rather than scintillating graphics. Thetext on your site must contain the most important keywords- the words that potential customers will be typing intosearch engines to find your site.

Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this isnot desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a highranking on search engines, this text is essential. However,the search engines must be able to read the text, meaningthat the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take yourcursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are ableto do this, the text is HTML. If the text will nothighlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case,ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format inorder to increase your search engine rankings.

Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know thissounds like something out of science fiction, but it isreally just simple code. Many people believe that meta tagsare the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality,they only have a limited effect. Still, it's worth addingthem in the event that a search engine will use meta tagsin their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you mustaccess the code. To do this, click the "view" button on thebrowser menu bar, and select "source." This will pull up awindow revealing the underlying code that created the page.If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top ofthe window. For example, a meta tag would read: metaname="keywords" content=. If you do not find code thatreads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. Thismay not do much for your search engine rankings, but anylittle boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is afactor that is extremely important in terms of searchengine rankings. Almost all search engines use linkpopularity to rank your website. Link popularity is basedon the quality of the sites you have linked to from yourlinks page.

If you type in "free link popularity check" in a popularsearch engine, the search engine will then show you whatsites are linked to your site. In the case that therearen't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sitesthat are linked up have low search engine rankings,consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially,this entails contacting quality sites and requesting thatthey exchange links with your site. Of course, thisrequires checking out the rankings of the websites you wantto link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not onlyboosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs morequality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for asuccessful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go outand hire a search engine optimization company, try takingsome of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can'tboost your rankings yourself. Don't ever ignore thisall-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, thehigher your search engine ranking, the more qualitycustomers will be directed your way.

Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings

Your website's ranking on search engines is a vital elementof your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways toimprove your link popularity through legitimate methods.Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands ofdishonest webmasters seeking to improve their link popularity by faking out search engines.

The good news is that search engines have figured this out,and are now on guard for "spam" pages and sites that haveincreased their rankings by artificial methods. When asearch engines tracks down such a site, that site isdemoted in ranking or completely removed from the searchengine's index.

The bad news is that some high quality, completelyabove-board sites are being mistaken for these web pagecriminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up inthe "spam" net and tossed from a search engine's index,even though you have done nothing to deserve such harshtreatment. But there are things you can do - and things youshould be sure NOT to do - which will prevent this kind ofmisperception.

Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites youare linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigningwebsite ranking, and virtually all search engines on theInternet now use it. There are legitimate ways to go aboutincreasing your link popularity, but at the same time, youmust be scrupulously careful about which sites you chooseto link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sitesthat have linked to other sites solely for the purpose ofartificially boosting their link popularity. They haveactually labeled these links "bad neighborhoods."

You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot bepenalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site;penalty happens only when you are the one sending out thelink to a bad neighborhood. But you must check, anddouble-check, all the links that are active on your linkspage to make sure you haven't linked to a bad neighborhood.

The first thing to check out is whether or not the pagesyou have linked to have been penalized. The most direct wayto do this is to download the Google toolbar athttp://toolbar.google.com/. You will then see that mostpages are given a "Pagerank" which is represented by asliding green scale on the Google toolbar.

Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on thescale. This is especially important when the scale iscompletely gray. It is more than likely that these pageshave been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, youmay catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may bedifficult to recover from the infection.

There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whosescale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale.These sites have not been penalized, and their links maygrow in value and popularity. However, do make sure thatyou closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain thatat some point they do not sustain a penalty once you havelinked up to them from your links page.
Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use toartificially boost their link popularity is the use ofhidden text. Search engines usually use the words on webpages as a factor in forming their rankings, which meansthat if the text on your page contains your keywords, youhave more of an opportunity to increase your search engineranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive ofkeywords.

Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hidingtheir keywords in such a way so that they are invisible toany visitors to their site. For example, they have used thekeywords but made them the same color as the backgroundcolor of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords ona white background. You cannot see these words with thehuman eye - but the eye of search engine spider can spotthem easily! A spider is the program search engines use toindex web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, itgoes back and boosts that page's link ranking.

Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, butsearch engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as asearch engine perceive the use of hidden text - splat! thepage is penalized.
The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bitoverzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. Forexample, if the background color of your page is gray, andyou have placed gray text inside a black box, the spiderwill only take note of the gray text and assume you areemploying hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty,simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same colorto text as the background color of the page - ever!

Another potential problem that can result in a penalty iscalled "keyword stuffing." It is important to have yourkeywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes youcan go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to pleasethose spiders. A search engine uses what is called"Keyphrase Density" to determine if a site is trying toartificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio ofkeywords to the rest of the words on the page. Searchengines assign a limit to the number of times you can use akeyword before it decides you have overdone it andpenalizes your site.

This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpasswithout sounding as if you are stuttering - unless yourkeyword is part of your company name. If this is the case,it is easy for keyword density to soar. So, if your keywordis "renters insurance," be sure you don't use this phrasein every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site sothat the copy flows naturally and the keyword is notrepeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keywordshould never appear in more than half the sentences on thepage.

The final potential risk factor is known as "cloaking." Tothose of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept shouldbe easy to understand. For the rest of you?cloaking is whenthe server directs a visitor to one page and a searchengine spider to a different page. The page the spider seesis "cloaked" because it is invisible to regular traffic,and deliberately set-up to raise the site's search engineranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everythingit needs to rocket that page's ranking to the top of thelist.

It is natural that search engines have responded to thisact of deception with extreme enmity, imposing steeppenalties on these sites. The problem on your end is thatsometimes pages are cloaked for legitimate reasons, such asprevention against the theft of code, often referred to as"pagejacking." This kind of shielding is unnecessary thesedays due to the use of "off page" elements, such as linkpopularity, that cannot be stolen.

To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster isaware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make surethe webmaster understands that cloaking of any kind willput your website at great risk.

Just as you must be diligent in increasing your linkpopularity and your ranking, you must be equally diligentto avoid being unfairly penalized. So be sure to monitoryour site closely and avoid any appearance of artificiallyboosting your rankings.