Search Engine rankings
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Introduction |
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This article will give advice on how to gain or improve your search engine rankings. Keep in mind, however, that each search engine company uses its own methods on determining a Web site’s rank, and their methods may change frequently. |
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Everyone who wants business on the internet wishes for higher search engine rankings. |
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Do not stop your marketing and advertising efforts at search engines. High rankings and lots of traffic do not guarantee sales or income. |
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There are many topics to consider before you begin optimizing or submitting.
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Sponsored (paid) vs. Organic (free) listings
Organic (free) listings appear below or on the main body of the page. You get high listings here by optimizing your Web site properly, maintaining good inbound links, and having content people want to find. Each search engine has a proprietary method for ranking sites. |
There are several things you can do to improve your Web site’s search engine rankings.
· Relevant content
· Linking
o Cross Linking
o Inbound Links
· Submissions
· Optimization
Relevant content is perhaps the most important factor in determining your search engine rankings. If you want to come up highly placed for a particular keyword, publish content on your site that is relevant to the kind of customer you want to attract.
If your business focuses on selling products to decorate a new home, for instance, add some pages to your site with tips on how to decorate, and current trends, and then put links from these pages directly to the products on your Web site. When you submit your site to search engines, submit these new pages, and then update and add to them frequently.
Linking is important in gaining recognition from search engines. As a search engine crawls over a site, it follows all of the links that point to other Web sites, so that it can index those pages as well. The more links a search engine finds that point to your site (especially ones relevant to a particular subject), the better rankings you are likely to get.
All links are important, but links that come from a highly ranked site are even more important.
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Cross Linking is where two or more Web sites add links to each other’s pages.
Example: a real estate office adds a
link to their home page for housewarming gifts to a gift site, and the gift
site adds a link for properly which points to the real estate office Web site.
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Inbound Links are where another site points a link to your own site, and does not
expect a link back. For example, a
site may offer advice on interior decorating, and offer a link to an article on
your site as reference for their visitors.
Add relevant content to your site, and then communicate with the people who run
related sites. Invite them to add
links to that content on your site.
Optimization for search engines means that you are configuring your Web site to rank very highly with each search engine that crawls it. There’s a lot of controversy over the best ways to do this, as each engine does have its own method for ranking sites. Optimized for one may not necessarily be optimized for another – but in general, what works with one at least will not hurt you with another.
One way to optimize for high rankings is to attempt to fool the search engines into believing you offer something you do not – such as content or products you do not offer. Adding “Brittney Spears” to your meta tags, for example, may fool some search engines into believing that you offer content (such as stories or articles) or products that feature Brittney Spears. This may help your rankings for that search word for a time, but will hurt you in the long run. Once the search engine software discovers your trick, they will take action against your rankings.
A better way to optimize is a method called “White hat” optimization. Using this method, you look for legitimate means to improve your rankings. Since each search engine has their own method for determining rankings, you may need to research each company to learn what things they like or do not like.
General optimization advice
Meta tags
· Insure that your meta tags are relevant to the type of customer you want to attract
· Do not use the same word in your meta tag section more than three times (e.g., “Christmas, Christmas presents, Christmas ornaments, Christmas gifts” would be four uses of the word Christmas)
· Place the most relevant keywords at the beginning of the keyword area – some search engines only view the first 15 or 20
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The Title Tag is a special HTML element meta
tag. Web browsers usually display it
in the title
bar when the window is open, and in the task bar when
it is minimized. It may become the default filename when saving the page, Search
engines' web crawlers may pay particular attention to the words used in the
title element.
Enter your company name as part of the title tag, so that when your Web
site is minimized, a visitor can see which browser has your site. When specifying a Title Tag for a department,
add a few words that define the department. (e.g., “Fred’s Gifts –
Jewelry for Her” is useful to both a search engine, and your site
visitor.) Some search engines
consider this field very important.
Keywords in regular or body text
· Use relevant keywords in body text, not just meta tags
· Do not gratuitously insert multiple keywords that do not make up a regular sentence. (e.g., “We sell Christmas products, birthday gifts, seasonal gifts, holiday gifts, Valentine’s gifts, Halloween products, Thanksgiving gifts, and more” will not work well with search engines)
Search Engine Optimization from eMerchantClub
eMerchantClub (eMC) offers two types of search engine services – Search Engine Submission, and Search Engine Optimization.
For more information on how these packages can help you, please contact our Web sales department at 888-919-7627.