With search engines like Google currently indexing over 8 billion pages, it is becoming more and more difficult to get a top search engine ranking. Type in a popular search phrase such as "Internet Marketing" into Yahoo or Google and you will be returned over 8 million results!Unless your website is in first two or three pages, it is unlikely that you will receive many visitors from search engines.
So what should a webmaster do to give their website best chance of ranking high in search engines?
All search engines work slightly differently and have ever changing algorithms for ranking web pages, but these tips can be applied when planning, developing or marketing a website to help you reach that top page of search engine results.
(1) Choose your keywords carefully
It's extremely important to set aside time to research your keywords. It's best to do this in planning stages, before developing your website, but many of us start a website without knowing a thing about how search engines work, so you may find yourself doing this weeks or months later.
Try to choose phrases that are searched on frequently and if possible have a low number of competing websites.
To get an idea of number of times a keyword is searched for per month, type a keyword into box at
Overture Search Suggestion Tool
This will tell you how many times your keyword was searched on in previous month (based on Overture's partner search engines) and give you a list of similar keywords.
Another useful tool to help you choose your keywords is Word Tracker. This tool will help you choose your keywords and give you a "KEI" for each set of keywords based on popularity of keyword (number of searches) and amount of competition.
You can try this out for free on:
Wordtracker
If you manage to pick your keywords in planning stages you may even be lucky enough to find a domain name that contains your keywords.
(2) Optimise your pages
Once you have decided on your keywords you will need to optimise your pages for those keywords. Here are a few tips.
- Ensure that Title of your page contains your keywords.
- Mention your keywords inside meta tags. Most search engines no longer use meta tags, but some make use of them so it is still worthwhile using these.
- Try to make sure that first occurance of readable text on your page contains your keywords
- Ensure that your keywords are mentioned in initial paragraph of your page