Want a better website ranking?

By Clare Lawrence
Posted Thursday, October 7, 2004

Almost everyone wants to improve their rankings in the search engines, also known as Search engine results placement. How to do it? The web is full of services offering to submit your website to 1,000’s of search engines and directories for $19.99.

As you might imagine nearly all of these services produce very disappointing results.

How should I go about it? I focus on Google, the leading search engine as it currently accounts for about 56% of global web searches. I have also learnt by painful and expensive experience but got there.

Play by the rules

First things first. Google is fighting a war against spammers, those who attempt to artificially inflate their SERPS. To be successful in the long run you need to keep to the guidelines. Google helpfully publishes these at (http://www.google.com/guidelines.htm)

If you have spammed your site in an attempt to get to the top, then perhaps now is the time to de-spam it.

Content is King

Search engines are looking for content that is relevant, the results shown from a search sort in to order the sites by order of relevance. The more a page is about a subject the better its ranking will be.

Decide on what keywords you want to rank under.

Then use these keywords on a page regularly, this increases it’s a pages relevance, but not if you get too carried away, that’s spamming.

Links

Google’s PageRank technology measures the importance of a site by the number of pages that link to it. The greater the number of inward links your site has then the more valuable its page are viewed to be. Particularly important is the use of keywords as anchor text, for example the phrase Domain Name Registration when linked to a page about domain names, gives a boost to the destination site.

The content of the page the links comes from is also an important consideration, as are the absolute number of links. The more out-going links, the less valuable is the benefit passed on.

Avoid links pages if you can, Google is getting better and better at spotting lists of links.

Directories

Getting a listing in directories is important but only a few are really valuable.

The importance ones, being:-

Dmoz – A free directory but very slow to be updated by its human editors, powers around 250 search services.

Yahoo – Increasingly challenging Google.
JoeAnt
Gimpsy
Business.com
Allthebizz.com
Skaffe

Put it to work

You now know what it takes, the difficult part now begins, you have take a good look at the quality of your current content, and start building your links. How long it takes to get good SERPS will depend on how competitive your chosen phrases are.

If you follow my advice here, you will get there; it takes time, and be patient it will work.

I wish you the best of luck, if you want advice then get in touch.

About the Author
Clare Lawrence is CEO of Discount Domains Ltd – A leading UK provider of Domain name registration and Web Hosting services. Please feel free to re-publish this article provided this reference box remains together with a hyperlink to (http://www.discountdomainsuk.com) Clare can also be contacted on clare@discountdomainsuk.com.