Not Happy With Your Search Engine Ranking?

By Pani Theodorou
Posted Friday, February 13, 2004

Are you getting the results you need from your website? Fact: traffic and search engine results are the key to website success.
Everyone agrees that you don't just need traffic for website success, right? You need "targeted" traffic. The old chestnut of quality over quantity is far truer here than anywhere else.

Indeed, millions of hits aren't guaranteed to get you millions of sales. The hits need to be from people who are actually LOOKING for your product or service. Your sales would increase dramatically if you could only get these people to your site.

One option is to pay a company to bring you targeted traffic, but it's difficult to verify if the hits they send you are worth the money you are paying - you may not see the results you were hoping for.

How Do I Get Hold Of Quality Hits?

Well, ask yourself what you do when looking for something on the net? You use a search engine, right? Which one? It is estimated that at least 70% of people use Google as their preferred Search Engine.

Yet, if your own website appears past page 2 on Google's results, you have to admit - you probably wouldn't even find your own company, would you?

How Do I Improve My Results On Google?

In the past, Google worked by evaluating your site's meta tags - (those ubiquitous "keywords") - and the relevance of your keywords and description to the actual content inside your site. It still does this to an extent, but things have changed. Since tricksters started to bend the keyword and content rules, Google wisely altered the rules.

Indeed, new schemes and dirty tricks may fool Google's spiders for a short while, yet the clever and jolly-fair people at Google eventually put a stop to any success these scams might have, and worse, they may actually ban your site for using them.

It is far, far better to stay legal and do things properly from the start.

TOP 5 TIPS For Success:

5. Be spider friendly. Don't use too much flash or other add-ons, irrelevant keywords, fast meta refresh, same coloured text as background, or duplicated pages with different domain names. Also, don't use frames - spiders don't like them.

4. Write optimized content which relates to the keywords you are targeting. You should aim for a keyword density of about 7% in relation to your total text content which, at minimum, should be around 300 words. Start with your index page, and remember that the more pages within your site you "optimize" in this way, the better. Add rich text content to all your pages, interspersed with keywords you would like to see ranked.

Don't overuse keywords or repeat them too often. This could be seen as an attempt to trick the spiders and could get you banned. It can be tricky to find the right balance. If you're not sure - hire an expert.

3. Remember that website design and Search Engine optimization are two different fields. Make sure your web designers know what they are doing. A beautiful site won't get you ranked.

2. Be cautious in using doorway pages, gateway pages, information pages and lead-in pages. Such pages can be both good and bad but need to be used carefully and should not be hosted within your own domain.

Make hyperlinks effective - ideally by including your keywords within the links. This can really improve your ranking. Whatever you do - do NOT join dodgy schemes that post your hyperlink on "hundreds" of sites. Such link farming sites could lead you to disappear from Google's pages altogether.

1. Leg Work. Google fuels its results on the number of hyperlinks that point to your website from other sites. The higher the page rank on these sites, the better. (You'll need to install the Google Toolbar to check a site's page rank.) You can check backward links to find out how many pages currently list your website. You can also check your competitor's backward links, and hopefully these sites will also list your site (but don't count on it, and you may have to pay to advertise). You need hundreds of these links to secure a top position on Google.

(Note: If you can include your chosen keyword phrase in your hyperlinks on other sites, then you'll see better results).

It's time-consuming and can seem like an uphill battle. Luckily, though, you can outsource this work to specialist companies. The price can vary widely, but as competition rises, you should see prices dropping.)

And this is mostly just for Google! If you want to tap the potential of other Search Engines (after all, why not capture the remainder of the market while you're at it), then you'll need to work on other techniques to make sure that your website secures at least a first page result.

Finally, if you're skilled enough to get yourself a first page Google result - don't just sit back thinking all the work is done - it isn't!

Search Engines constantly update and modify their ranking criteria. What was successful today may not be successful tomorrow. You need to keep up to date - after all around 150,000 new domains are registered each and every month - you don't want new sites to push you down in the ranking!

About The Author
For a free evaluation of your website send an email to panitheo@hotmail.com, with your name & telephone number, web address and main keyword. Pani Theodorou is a consultant for WebIT21.com, a Search Engine Optimization company and the only UK company that guarantees a search engine ranking for your website.