How to Improve Search Engine Rankings
by Herman Drost
You finally got your web site listed in the major search engines, however it is
buried amongst millions of others and you still have not seen an increase in traffic
to your web site. Why not? You need to improve your search engine rankings. Here are
the steps to increase your search engine rankings:
1. Check your listings
If you are going to see an increase in traffic to your web site, you need to be listed
in the top 20-30 sites. Go to
www.marketleap.com to see if you are listed in the top 30 sites on the major
search engines. If you are not listed in them, you should at least submit your site to
the major search engines (read "How to get listed in the major search engines".
www.isitebuild.com/majorsearchengines). If you are already in the top 10, then
keep monitoring your site's rankings to maintain your position. If you are not in the
top 30, continue with the next step.
2. Select the right keywords and phrases
Go to www.wordtracker.com
or the overture suggestion tool (inventory.overture.com) to find the most popular words
and phrases that suit the theme of your web site.
Weave these words and phrases into your meta tags (title, description and keyword
tags), web copy (particularly the first 200 words of your web page) and links (i.e.
if your site is called camping.com and you have a page for camping tools, name the
link www.camping.com/campingtools.htm, instead of www.camping.com/generic.htm).
Optimize each web page with different keywords. Visitors can then enter your site
from different pages, depending on what keyword they entered in the search engines.
3. Exchange reciprocal links
Search for other sites that compliment your own site and ask for a link back to your
site. Ideally the site should have the same keyword phrase as yours and already have
a high search engine ranking. These are quality links.
Having many sites linked to yours, will increase the popularity of your site in the
search engines, resulting in a higher ranking.
4. Write articles
Choose your best keywords and weave them into the theme of your articles. Include a
link to your web site in the resource box at the end of your articles. Submit your
articles to ezine publishers and article announcement lists. This gives your article
the potential to be read by thousands of ezine subscribers. Your article will become
linked to many web sites, resulting in higher rankings.
5. Participate in forums
Find a forum that is related to the theme of your web site. People visit these forums
to look for content that answers their questions. Once you have provided helpful
information, you can leave a link to your site in your signature file. If this is a
highly trafficked forum, leaving your link there, will increase your site's popularity.
| 
About BTH
User Agreement
Privacy
Site Map
Contact
News Feeds
RSS Feed
Follow @Stephen Bucaro
Web Design for Marketing
