Top search engine ranking, now what?Written by Andy Beal
Congratulations, your website is at top of search engines and your traffic is at record levels. Sales are up and your boss is grinning like a Cheshire cat. No doubt, as person in charge of marketing your website, you have either spent hours researching great sites such as Search Engine Guide or Search Engine Watch and have achieved results yourself or, more than likely, you have employed services of a search engine marketing company. Either way, you now proudly sit at top of search engine results for golden keywords you wanted.Don’t get complacent So now that you are at top of search engines, you can sit back, relax and enjoy months of great positioning, right? Wrong! The effort it took to get your website top positioning is nothing compared to effort needed to keep it there. Now that you are on top of world looking down, you need to make sure that you remain in great shape. Granted, some search engines do not need same type of effort to keep your website at top, but you are still looking at a full time job and a constant battle to ensure that your website doesn't start slipping down to ranking oblivion Changing face of search engines Your first challenge is keeping up-to-date with changing face of search engines. Search engines are relentless machines, constantly looking for new enhancements and modifications to make to their results. Popular search engines such as Google, AltaVista and Lycos are forever competing against each other for crown of “best search engine”. Subscribe to SearchEngineGuide.com’s newsletter and you will repeatedly read news and propaganda from different search engines claiming to have either most accurate algorithm or highest number of visitors. It is this battle for bragging rights that drives search engines to improve their results and keep ahead of competition. With these changes happening on a more than occasional basis, constant monitoring and tweaking of your website are vital to ensure that your #1 position today, does not become a #30 position tomorrow.
| | 'How to Achieve High Rankings in the Search Engines'Written by Sue Doughty
A frequent question asked is "Why do some people achieve a high search engine positioning and get plenty of traffic while others do not? Simple. The people who have high search engine positions in major search engines selected keywords that many people are searching with and placed those keywords in body of their content correctly. This is what is known as search engine optimization or keyword optimization.Search engine optimization will be one of most important investments you will make. Whether you decide to take on project yourself or hire a professional service, we highly recommend search engine optimization before you submit to search engines. Keywords: Do's and Don'ts Here are some tips on how to optimize your web pages and achieve high search engine rankings for your web pages using keywords, meta tags2 and effective copy writing. This article is best suited for webmaster or author of web site content. It is usually webmaster who is responsible for making sure that pages are search engine ready. This article contains web page code snippets (SHOWN IN THIS TYPEFACE) given as examples to follow. Although this article is technical in nature, it is vital to anyone who wants to achieve a high search engine ranking. Use of Keywords Keywords and keyword phrases must occur often and near beginning of TITLE tag, DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS meta tags and BODY5 of your web pages. The more frequent keywords appear and nearer they appear to beginning of tags and pages, greater chance of achieving high search engine positioning. The tags3 that are most important for page optimization are (in following order): 1. The TITLE tag Example: Plumbing Supplies CompanyThis is most important tag on your web page. It should begin with most important search phrase users will enter to find your site. It is more important than content and it is more important than description or keywords meta tags. Users searching for "plumbing supplies² will stand a greater chance of finding your site using above title than if it were: Plumbing Supply Company2. The DESCRIPTION meta tag Example: Use a plain English sentence of no more than 40 words for your description. Again, description should begin with most important keywords. Search engines will often use contents of this tag to display results of a search. If there is no description meta tag then search engine will attempt to build one from content at top of body of page. Words like "Back Next Products Support² won't mean anything to users reading search results. Also do not use a list of keywords as a description. Search engines will see this as an attempt to achieve a high ranking and will probably penalize you and your site may appear much lower on list as a result. 3. The KEYWORDS meta tag Example: Although keywords meta tag is important, most search engines will derive keywords from actual content of web pages. Nevertheless, you should include keywords meta tag in all pages you want indexed. Do not "spam4² search engines by repeating keywords. If you do you will most likely be penalized with a lower ranking or even banned altogether. Additionally, only use keywords that appear in actual content of page. If search engines detect that you are trying to score a high ranking by using keywords that have nothing to do with content of page then you risk being penalized or banned.
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