At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on
Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results,
greater
traffic that is directed to your website. That's what search engine optimization is about. You can immerse yourself in all
technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is
title bar on your homepage.
The title bar is
colored bar at
top of
page. Look at
words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings,
words on your homepage's title bar should include
most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.
Then click on all your links and examine
title bars on
pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain
most important keywords and phrases taken from
page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in
title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.
The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain
most important keywords -
words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.
Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However,
search engines must be able to read
text, meaning that
text must be in HTML and not graphic format.