How to get a better search engine ranking

If you don't want to spend to much money to get a better seach engine ranking, read our website optimization tips and increase your website traffic for free.

Tips for better search engine ranking

Pay a lot of attention to the content in a page's title and this should describe exactly what the page is about.The page title should also have a good keyword which describes the page content. To keep within the limits of many search engines the number of words for the title shouldn’t exceed nine.Keywords in the title tags are one of the most important factors for optimization. Search engines display your title tags in the search results. Do not let your site’s title exceed 60 characters, and make sure it makes sense and is not just a list of keywords

Use relevant keywords on your website. Having good keywords is one of the most important areas to consider when designing a web site. A keyword rich article can contain a keyword density of five to seven percent. Your articles must also be well edited to make them both search engine and user friendly. Optimize your web site for your keywords. Site down with a sheet of paper and write down a list of 20 keyword phrases that define what your site is about. These will be the phrases that you will want your visitors to be searching for to get to your web site. Once you have your list then try and integrate as many of these phrases into your website copy as possible. Make sure however that the readability of a site's content is not compromised as this will often be seen as spam. Try and use these keywords in your title's and in the first couple of paragraphs as this is the part of the page the search engine will pay the most attention to. Search engines evaluate keyword prominence, keyword weight, and keyword density when determining a site's ranking. All three are calculated individually for the page, the title tag, the description tag, as well as other areas on a page. Keyword prominence means how close the keyword is to the beginning of your page. Keyword weight refers to how many times a particular keyword or phrase can be found on the page. Keyword density is the ratio of the keyword to the other words on the webpage. You do not want the keyword weight or density to be too high, as this can appear to the search engine as "keyword stuffing" and most search engines penalize sites that stuff their keywords.

Use meta tags on your web site and use relevant keywords These tags will help search engines to navigate through your information. Try not to use words such as "and", "or", or "the" in these tags.

Use page description tag. This is the text found under the META Description tag and is displayed to users in the search results. The description tag is a little more important than the keyword tags but still much less relevent than the title tag. Again, it is a good idea to pay attention to the use of good keywords when writing the description, which should be short (not more than 20-25 words) and sells your page before the user has even opened it!

Another tip for get top search engine ranking is to include title tags for your relavant images and web links. Title tags for your links will help search engines to determine what your links are about and what to expect. Title tags with your links also gives a user a description of what to expect!

Give the page a heading title that matches or is very similar to the page title and include it in a <H1></H1>. If you don't like the appearance of the text within a H1 you can format the text style within your css document. Search engines assume that the text contained in heading tags is more important than the rest of the document text, as headings describe the content immediately below them. Using and heading tags will also help the user read your articles more easily.

Try to use similar text in the "title" and "description" tags.

Create a usefull website content with relevant keywords. Many search engines look at the main body of the page and identify keywords and phrases that are used within the text. Use competitive keywords relevant to the purpose of the page within the main body of the page. Quality content provided 200 word minimum per page. The more content there is on a page the easier it is for search engines to work out what the page is actually about. Search engines may struggle to work out the point of a web page with less than 200 words, ultimately penalising that page in the search rankings. Don't be afraid to put a reasonably large amount of information on to a page. Content should amount to 50-80% of your page design, with navigation taking up approximately 20% of the space. Quality web site content is the first step to get a better search engine ranking.

Search engines also prefer CSS-based sites and are likely to score them higher in the search engine ranking, because the code is cleaner and therefore more accessible to search engines, important content can be placed at the top of the HTML document, There is a greater density of content compared to coding. Most of the code in an html document is table alignment code

Optimize graphics. Use alt tag containing the relevant keyword(s). Although the use of images can be nice and very appealing to a website, it is also important to bear in mind that they shouldn’t overpower the textual content of your page. As a general rule of thumb it is best to stick to a 70/30 ratio (70 text/30 images).

Check your web page size and download time. Try to make websites up to 100kb maximum HMTL size. A 100kb HMTL file will take 20 seconds to download on a 56k dial up modem.

Try to make external links to your webpage. Actively seek good links from websites in the same interest area as your site. The more important the site the better as search engines will place a higher value for a link from an "authority" site than from for a link from a less popular site. Make sure that in your link text you include your keywords rather than just the name of your site. You need at least 35 quality back links to make google going to your web site and take a look at you. You can get these quality links by submitting your site to high-ranked web site directories or by writing some quality articles and then submitting them to the high-ranked online article archives. Only backward links from quality web sites count. Websites poorly indexed or with very low search engine ranking have no value to get a better search engine ranking for your web site.

If you need to use JavaScript put all JavaScript code in a separate .js file and include it in the header of your web page (Example:<script language="JavaScript" src="/scripts/javascript_code.js"></script> ).

When the search engines "read" your web site, they read from the top left to the bottom right. Search engines place an emphasis on the first 100 words or text on the site.

Create search engine friendly url's. This can have a huge effect on the number of pages of your site that will be indexed. A lot of search engines steer away from indexing pages that have a lot of parameters. We've all seen them. www.web_site_name.com/index.php?id=1&info=6 and such things. Some search engines will stop when they see a ? and therefore it won't be able to see all the content in the site.

Directory optimization. Make sure to name your files and directories with relevant keywords. Most search engines do not recognize beyond two directory levels. File names should be not too long.

Avoid using frames. Using frames is one of the worst possible things you could do for your better search engine ranking, as most search engines can't follow links between frames. Even if a search engine does index your pages and web users find you through a search engine, they'll be taken to one of the pages within the frame. This page will probably be a content page with no navigation (navigation is normally contained in a separate frame) and therefore no way to navigate to any other page on the site! Frames are also disadvantageous for usability as they can cause problems with the back button, printing, history and bookmarking.

Avoid creating flash web sites. Search engine spiders cant read the flash.

It is important to use the font styles compatible with the browsers.

Use web safe colors. The reason for this was that Microsoft and Mac operating system used 40 different "reserved" fixed system colors.

When creating your 'Alt' tags for your gif's and jpeg's, be extra sure you do not place too many keywords there since the search engines appear to be getting wise to this seo method and might possibly penalize your page for it.

Avoid long load times. Flash, images, and audio can create long load times that make the user wait. And, if customers have to wait too long, they may leave and never come back. Fast loading images, are very important in designing your website. The faster your site loads, the easier it becomes for your visitor to understand your content. If a page doesn't load in 8 seconds, Web site will lose 1/3 of the visitors.

A good internal linking system also helps search engine spiders to index your website.

Choosing a right domain name. When choosing a domain name, one should pick either your business name or a brief description of your products. Domain names can always help with search engine optimization, as it is another area of your web site that important keywords can appear. If you need to change your domain name for any reason, you obviously don't want to lose your existing rankings. An easy way to do this, and one that is currently supported by most search engines, is the 301 redirect. It allows you to keep your existing search engine rankings for your old domain name, while forwarding visitors of that site to your new one virtually seamlessly.

Create a well-organized site. The navigation you use on the home page should be carried out throughout your web site. While preparing the layout of your website, remember the navigation links. Navigation links embedded with key words are an asset in search engine ranking. But beware, stuffing your navigation links with too many keywords may land you in trouble!

Write without error. Avoid poor grammar, typographical errors, and misspellings. Use spell-checking and grammar-checking technologies.

Use alt tags for all images. Using alt tags will help your surfers who use text only browsers. Many search engines use alt tags to determine the keyword relevancy. Place alt tags on all of your images. Search engine spiders cannot "read" pictures or images. The only way a spider knows what an image is about is by reading the alt tag. This is also another chance to place more of your keywords in your HTML, improving your page's keyword density. Search engines separately calculate keyword prominence, density, and weight in alt tags as well, so optimize your tags.

Make sure the all the web pages are compatible with the latest versions of most internet browsers: Internet explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera and Netscape.

Screen resolution compatibility is very important. Compatibility in 800 and 1024 resolution is a must.

Make sure the coding is done according to the W3C standards (http://validator.w3.org). Search engines are constantly rewarding web sites that utilize clean and validated HTML.

Use sitemaps on your website. Site map is a fantastic way for search engines to find all your web pages on your website. A site map lists all the pages you feel are important for the search engines to index. Site maps are very important if you want search engine spiders to index each and every page of your site. A site map also provides a guide to your entire website content and helps your visitor navigate your site easily. Site map helps your web site to get a better search engine ranking.

Use easy and simple navigation links on your website. There are some engines which find it difficult to navigate through to the other pages on your website if the navigation bar is too complicated, e.g. complicated pop-ups, use of flash, etc.

Search engines place a lot of importance on link text too. They assume that link text will be descriptive of its destination and as such examine link text for all links pointing to any page.

Make your own 404 error page. Through the 404 error page, make it easy for the users to find where they want to go. Use HTML links and include a search box.

Never have lots of out-bound link on your index page and secondly exchange links with only those website which have similar content or sell complementary products. Search engines are very smart and can easily know from your meta tags if the site you are linking to has similar content or not. Don't try to fool the search engine or you will end up a fool yourself. Having quality site linking to you would mean a better rank to your website.You should never have more then 25 outgoing links per page, if you start getting close to the 25, create a 2nd page and put new links on there. Putting more then 25 on one page will start to penalize your search engine rankings. Make sure to use a good anchor text, if you already optimized your title tag to have your keywords, you can just use that. Anchor text is the link text pointing to your site.

Affiliate Program. You can promote your affiliate program to other webmasters through discussion boards or emails, think about it, you can have tons of webmasters linking to your products.

Submit your site to search engines. No one will find your site if you don’t let them know about it. Your site must be posted to search engines such as Google, MSN, Lycos, Yahoo, Excite and others. There are approximately 20 to 30 main search engines and several hundred that are smaller or specialized. Once your site is ready for the search engines, then you have to submit it to them. You have two choices: either go to each search engine and submit your site individually, or use a search engine submission tool. Remember that the majority of searchers use either Google, Yahoo or MSN, so consider submitting to those first. You’ll often find a link on their main page where you can add a site to their search engine.

Publish an e-zine from your web site. Ask your visitors to subscribe to the e-zine right from your web site through a sign up box. You might want to find something to entice them to give you their email address, like a free report or eBook. Once you have enough subscribers to your e-zine, you could sell classified or sponsor advertising inside your e-zine, or you could periodically review and recommend products that you're an affiliate for to your subscribers.

Now you are ready to optimize your web site to get a better search engine ranking.

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How to get a better search engine ranking

Tips for better search engine ranking