Want a better website ranking? By Clare Lawrence 8th June 2004 Almost everyone wants to improve their rankings in 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, 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 rules
First things first. Google is fighting a war against spammers, those who attempt to artificially inflate their SERPS. To be successful in long run you need to keep to guidelines. Google helpfully publishes these at www.google.com/guidelines.htm
If you have spammed your site in an attempt to get to top, then perhaps now is time to de-spam it.
Content is King
Search engines are looking for content that is relevant, results shown from a search sort in to order sites by order of relevance. The more a page is about a subject 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 importance of a site by number of pages that link to it. The greater number of inward links your site has then more valuable its page are viewed to be. Particularly important is use of keywords as anchor text, for example phrase Domain Name Registration when linked to a page about domain names, gives a boost to destination site.