So your company has a website – an important step to validate your company, boost its visibility and increase its sales. Now how do you get it to show up on Google and other search engines like Yahoo and MSN?A high search engine ranking for your website is essential. At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on internet find them through search engines.
To increase your website’s ranking on search engines, you could hire a company to do it for you. There is a whole search engine optimization (SEO) industry that will gladly take your money. SEO is simpler than it is made out to be, and there are several steps that you can do yourself to increase rank of your website.
1. The content of your website is key. Search engines check to see if search words appear close to top of page and their frequency on page. You must first determine what key words that your customers search with. Consider website from perspective of a potential customer and try to understand what they would be searching for on web. Aim to have 100-250 words on each page with those key words used as often as possible. Those same key words should be included in title tag of your coding, but keep it to six words or less. (this is coloured bar at top of page). The site at http://www.related-pages.com/seoTools.aspx?cb=wgyr has some great tools to help you optimize key words.
2. Link Popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in search engine rank. Almost all of search engines use link popularity to rank websites. Inbound links matter most, and highly ranked sites linking to your site are worth more that lower ranked sites. If you can provide content that other sites want to link to, you will move up in rankings. This means that you may have to actively solicit links to your content and perhaps write articles for other websites.
3. Proper Page Structure. This can be tricky for people who don’t know HTML, but it really isn’t that complicated. Your pages should be coded correctly so they are easier for search engines to index. Your site should have easy to follow text navigation, and you should avoid using Flash to build your entire page because it makes site harder to index. If you want dynamics on your page generated by other languages such as JavaScript, you should have these codes in external files. There is also an html validation tool at http://validator.w3.org/ that is useful. Errors in programming code and incorrect html can keep search engine robots from indexing your web pages. Keep coding clean and simple.