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 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
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 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 meta tags. I know this
sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is
really 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 find out if your page is set up with meta tags, 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 meta tags, they usually 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.
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.
===== Helene Malmsio has been a successful business
entrepreneur for nearly 30 years and has been operating
Strategic Services group of Companies since 1987.
For more information on how to achieve high ranking for
your site, and to get your own copy of our free self
publishing ebook, go to http://www.buybooks-online.com
Article reprinted with permission from Strategic Services.
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