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Search Engine Ranking: Everything You Need to Know to Drive More Traffic to Your Website

By US TEC Speaker Raj Khera, CEO, MailerMailer

Getting your website well ranked in search engines can have a dramatic impact on your sales efforts. Search engines are constantly fine-tuning their indexing methods to make sure the most relevant results for search terms are at the top.

There are two forms of search engine listing:

Paid listings: Also known as “pay per click” (PPC) or sponsored listing, these often appear under the “sponsored links” section of a search results page. Companies can bid on keywords and phrases so that their ad appears when someone types a matching term
Natural or organic listings: Listings that a search engine presents based on “best match” criteria

Both methods are effective in driving traffic to websites, but people click natural listings five to six times more often than sponsored listings. Natural listings are free, but getting them requires some legwork. Search engine optimisation (SEO) firms specialise in this work. Their tactics and techniques are relatively simple to implement on your own.

Four major factors influence how your site gets ranked for various key words and terms. Here are strategies you can use to manipulate those factors and boost your rankings. Typically, it takes three to six months to see results from these techniques.

Use Keywords in Your Content

· Use common phrases: Write your web pages’ content using phrases that people are likely to search on. Search engines look for “word for word” phrase matches. If your site contains commonly searched phrases, you have a better chance of getting high ranked natural listings. The phrases “LA real estate” and “real estate in the LA area” both have the same meaning, but the first phrase maps more closely to what someone might type into a search engine, thereby giving you more exposure.
· Use descriptive text: Instead of using generic terms such as “our team,” use descriptive text such as “our accounting and bookkeeping services team.”
· Include 250+ words on each page: Search engines treat pages of at least 250 words of text with higher importance than pages with little text. Keywords imbedded in “context relevant” pages with more than 250 words will improve ranking.
· Target two or three key phrases: Pick two or three phrases or terms that you want to rank highly for and include those phrases at least three or four times on each page. These phrases should be semantically connected to the rest of the page copy.
· Name your files using your keywords: Use file names that match the terms you’re targeting. Always use dashes to separate the words in the file name (i.e. la-real-estate.html or hollywood-sign.jpg). Search engines view the dashes as a space between words. Do NOT use underscores.
· Vary word tense: Using plurals and various tenses of your keywords improves your ranking for the terms you’re targeting.
· Vary keywords from page to page: Change your keywords from page to page. Use unique or less common keyword terms on your interior pages. A term such as “accounting services” is a highly sought after term, and many sites will be optimised for that term. Even if you did get ranked well for a general term like this, people could be looking for all sorts of accounting related services, not the specific type you provide. Focus on using more specific terms such as “bookkeeping for government contractors in Maryland.” Specific terms increase your chance of being ranked highly in search results.

Get Other Sites to Link to Yours

Your website will rank more highly when search engines find links from other websites that point back to yours. Your rank will increase more when these incoming links come from other high ranking sites that have content relevant to yours.

To increase your number of incoming links, publish articles with links back to your site. Write those articles so they contain keywords you want to target. Here’s an example of how you can use your byline to link back to your site, notice the text in the second link describes the page that refers back to:

Copyright 2008 by http://www.MoreBusiness.com, where you can find over 100 free sample business plans.Here are some other tips regarding using links:

Hyperlink text to relevant content: When you link copy in your page to other pages with relevant content, you improve your ranking. Never link the phrase “click here.” Instead link descriptive phrases such as: “Tax Accounting Specialists in Maryland.” Those phrases should be terms for which you want to be ranked highly.
Limit your links: Do not put more than 100 links on a page. Otherwise, Google will classify your site as a “link farm” (a site that trade links with others to artificially improve ranking). Search engines now lower a site’s rankings for having too many links on a page.
Get .gov and .edu links: Search engines value links from these source significantly more than links from .com, .net and .org domains.

Examine Site Design and Structure

Sites that are simple to navigate increase search ranking. Keep your pages accessible. Every page on your site should be accessible from your home page within three to four clicks (preferably two to three clicks).

Use Tags Effectively

When coding pages in HTML, include appropriate text for these tags: TITLE, H1, META, and IMG SRC ALT.

· TITLE tag: Each web page has a TITLE tag. What you put in your TITLE tag it also appears on the top or bottom bar of your web browser’s window frame. Put your key phrase in your TITLE tag--the phrase that you want Google to view as your most important term for the page. Use a unique, specific title on every page of your site. The maximum length should be 50-75 characters. Do not use your company name in the TITLE tag. People will not typically search on your company name, and if they do, Google will find it anyway especially if it is part of your domain name.
· H1 tag: Header tags, such as H1, help search engines determine the topic of each page. Put your keywords and phrases for each page in your H1 header.
· META tag: The META tag should contain text that describes your page’s content. Google uses your META tag information to generate a brief description of your site. If this tag is missing, Google uses the first few lines of text from the page itself. Keep your description less than 160 characters, and make it compelling and informative to attract more visitors.
· IMG SRC ALT tags: Use ALT tags to describe your images and illustrations. Search engines cannot generate context from images so they rely on ALT tags to describe the image. The ALT tag for a logo should be specific and target some keywords. For example, the ALT tags that I use for the MailerMailer.com logo says "Email Marketing Service Logo"

Other Tips

Submitting a newly launched website to numerous search engines is no longer necessary. Getting listed in the key engines – Google and Yahoo – will enable you to reach the vast majority of all internet users.

· Google: To speed the process of Google finding your site, submit a Google sitemap using Google’s Webmaster Tools. Submitting a sitemap tells Google you are in existence, where to find you and other structural information about your site. Google checks your site periodically to see if it has been updated. If it finds frequent updates, it checks your site more often. Google’s “Webmaster Tools” shows you the last time Google "crawled" your site. To create a free account on Google’s “Webmaster Tools” see https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html.
· Yahoo: Yahoo offers both free and paid site submissions. If you use their paid submission option, Yahoo Directory Submit (which runs $299), they guarantee that your site will be reviewed in seven business days. They do not guarantee your site will be listed, but they promise to review it. More details are available at http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html.
· Other search engines: To reach other search engines submit your site to dmoz.org, an open directory database used by many search engines. Dmoz.org uses human editors, so they are often slow to index and post new sites.
· Online directories: Directories are subject specific website or web pages. Directories use humans, rather than programs, to review websites and categorise them within their directories. Submitting your site to various online directories is a good use of time. Some directories charge for listings, others do not. To find directories relevant to your business search Google for “ directories”. Listings in focused or niche directories can drive traffic to your website.

There are many other strategies to drive more traffic, such as using blogs or employing more technical tricks. Starting with the tactics above will go a long way toward getting higher search engine rankings for your website.