Tips for Search Engine Rankings

Search Engine Rankings are very important for most web sites. Many larger companies employ full time employees to ensure their company web site ranks high for the keywords and keyphrases they believe will give the most return.

Here are some useful tips to help your web site rank higher.

"Content is King"

Let's say your web site is Betty's Candy Store and you are wanting to reach customers searching for the keyword lollipop. Everything else being equal, which website will rank higher for lollipop ?

Not only does example #1 have the word lollipop included in the web page title, url, H1 header and through the content, it also includes multiple pages regarding lollipops and the images included are named with the word lollipop included and the alt text as well. You want to include these referances in a natural way. Just adding keywords for rankings sake is called "keyword stuffing" and can result in negative effects that could include actually banning your site.

Links to your web site indicate credibility

Search engines evaluate how many and what kinds of other web stes link to your. All things being equal, which website will rank higher for the desired keyword ?

Not only do search engines take into consideration the number of links in, it also considers the placement of the links and the popularity of the sites.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps should be generated and submitted to search engines and content should be kept up to date so that search engine crawlers will visit your content and are more likely to include it. Webie Design uses premium sitemap generator to generate and subit your site map to Google and monitor it through Google Webmaster Tools.

Keywords and Keyphrases

The word Lollipop is searched for 1,830,000 per month according to Google and you may be competing with large candy companies with large marketing and advertising budgets. You may want to consider concentrating on broader keywords or phrases so your site ranks higher such as, "Watermelon lollipops" or "lollipops in Vancouver, WA" to target customers more specifically.

Monitor your results

Monitoring your results can help you see how customers arrive at your web site and aid you in making adjustments to content. There are a number of ways to monitor your web site including Webalizer, AWStats, and Google Analytics.

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