Drubby World Wide Web Search

Search Engine Optimization - A Do-It-Yourself Guide for the Small Business Owner

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 the 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 the 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 the rank of your website.

1. The content of your website is key. Search engines check to see if search words appear close to the top of the page and their frequency on the page. You must first determine what the key words that your customers search with. Consider the website from the perspective of a potential customer and try to understand what they would be searching for on the 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 the title tag of your coding, but keep it to six words or less. (this is the coloured bar at the top of the 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 the 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 the 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 the 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 the 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 the search engine robots from indexing your web pages. Keep coding clean and simple.

4. META Tags. This may sound like something out of a science fiction movie, but it is very simple code that should be included in your site because its makes it more inviting to the search engine spiders that crawl the internet.

5. Don't Cheat. Don't try to 'spam' the search engines by including invisible keywords repeated hundreds of times or by repeating key words in META tags. The engines are getting smart and will penalize you for this. They may even drop your site all together.

6. Patience, Patience, Patience! It can take weeks for the search engines to re-index and re-rank your site once you have made changes or if you have a new site. Search engines are smart, but they taken time to sort through the vast amounts of information that's thrown at them. If you are patient, you will see results.

7. Many of the major search engines still include a free submission section for their listings. It may take 6-8 weeks (or more) for your listings to show up, but Google, AltaVista and Yahoo still accept free submissions. Since search engine rank is key for success on the internet, you may want to budget for search engine optimization and consider paid listings (Yahoo), or pay-per-click advertising on Google.

Good web design is a balance between what looks great and optimizing your site for search engines. Your content must be good enough so that other sites want to link to it while at the same time include key search words that will draw potential customers. You also need to have your site built correctly and take the time to manage it and keep it fresh. Now you are well on your way to having a high ranking website on Google. Good luck!

Colleen Happ designs effective and affordable websites and graphics. Her portfolio can be viewed at http://www.happconsulting.com. She offers free one hour consultations to show how an effective website can benefit your business.

MORE ARTICLES:

Faq?s For Helping Children Grieve The Loss Of A Family Member
Coping with a death in the family is one of the most difficult challenges that you and your children will ever undertake. Before you begin explaining death to your child, it may be very helpful to look back at your own childhood experiences with death.

Utilise Search Engine Optimisation Techniques to Get a Teaching Job Abroad
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the meat and potatoes of businesses hoping to make it on the internet, but did you realise that SEO can also be the key to wildly increasing the number of international school recruiters who see your eResume?

Lawrenceville's News, Lifestyles & Business Directory
The site is geared to become a major source of information for residents and a significant tool for businesses.

UK Insurance Search - Finding The Right Car Insurance With Search Engines!
Did you know that search engines could be your greatest tool in finding the right car insurance? With a cheap motor insurance quote, you can have a large amount of car insurance companies to check out, investigate, and compare right at your finger tips. Thanks to helpful websites, you could be well on your way to finding that deal you have been looking for when it comes to your car insurance.

Search Engine Optimization DHTML
For every websites to receive transfer it is a must to go in for SEO Canada, Internet Marketing Canada is become very well-liked with all website owners that expect excellence visitors and sales from their website. It is also significant to have a search engine friendly and user friendly websites. Know more about search engine friendly design read additional. DHTML Dynamic HTML, or DHTML, is essentially a mixture of HTML, JavaScript and css. It is this set of technologies, when brought together; allow us to make a dynamic web page HTML, gives the basic structure to the web page, while JavaScript gives the power to manipulate the data and CSS allows us to define the presentation and style of the document. DHTML is too the effect of more than...

Search Engine Responsive Pages
There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.

Simple Steps To Get Listed In Search Engines
Simple Steps To Get Listed In Search EnginesSearch engines are one of THE best resource for free advertising. Better your web site's search engine position better be the traffic generation. 85% of internet users go to search engines and find the information they want. So you better hurry to follow these simple tips to get guaranteed listing and good positioning in search engines. 1. Put a link to your new web site from already indexed web site(s). If you don't have a web site that already indexed then propose a joint venture with other web site owners for link exchanges. Needless to say that the web site you are going to exchange links must be indexed already. Search engine crawlers love to follow the links from one web site to other. So th...

Network Solutions Launches Improvements to Online Business Directory ThinkLocal?
Network Solutions® announces improvements to their online business directory at ThinkLocal.com. Like an online yellowpages, businesses can be searched and found and now, with improvements including driving directions and an easier to navigate layout, information about local businesses is even easier to obtain.

Search Engine Keywords Selection
Search Engine Keywords Selection

Search Engine Goes Loco, Uh... Local; Giving Away Millions of Dollars in Free Advertising to Local Businesses Nationwide
That Freudian slip shows just how SearchBigDaddy.com has turned the world of local search on its ear today with the announcement that it is launching 337 LOCAL City Portals across the United States that give away free advertising to local businesses in those City Portals.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
"Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique of building web pages that appeal to the criteria that search engines use to place sites at the top of search results. You may have the best product or service in your industry, but search engine web crawlers don?t use human judgment when ranking sites. Search engines look at valuable, relevant content related to the search query among numerous other factors.

High Search Engine Rankings - A Long Term Strategy
The last 1.5 years have shown major changes in search engine behavior across the board.

Honoring U.S. Military Veterans - The Veterans Business Directory at VetFriends.com
This Memorial Day, people can honor U.S. veterans in a new way: Thank them for their military service and then do business with them at the VetFriends.com nationwide online Veterans Business Directory. Additionally, VetFriends.com has teamed up with Bank of America - offering exclusive U.S. military pride credit cards reflecting the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard - available to all veterans, military, family and friends.

Get Ranked By Search Engines
In case you just finished building your site and you are asking yourself what?s the way to get ranked in search engines, how do I make my site work for me? It?s all about adding the right words at the right time, and knowing the secrets that drive some attention from the search engines