The Basics of a Search Engine Ranking

Search engine rankings will either make your online marketing successfully or make it a time / money sink that will kill your company. The better your rankings the more targeted traffic you will receive and the more conversions you will have.  By having a front page listing within the non paid advertising sections you increase your traffic to your website massively and if you have done all the work on your site to get conversions and to prequalify a client your bank account will show the results.

So that leads you to the BIG question.  “How do I do this, and HOW do I start earning money with my website?”  The answer is simple, you spend a little time learning what gets a search engine to rank websites and you adjust your site to meet those standards, or you spend thousands a month and hire someone to do it for you (I am available).

The criteria of search results can be summed up into 2 areas.

1. ON-Page Factors (your website)
2. OFF-Page Factors (Primarily Controlled by others)

Things you can control

• Title Tags
• Content of your site
• Domain Name
• The Design Code
• Linking within and going out of your site.

Things you can not control

• Inbound links from other sites
• Text of inbound links (Anchor Text)
• Page Rank of Site linking to you

Since you can control ON-Page factors lets spend a few looking at the basic ones that you should be doing already. Also for many of you these BASIC things can change your overall ranking quickly (as long as your not in the market of one of my Boot Camp Clients, those guys are sharks, just look around for a Greenville Balloon Guy he has 9 of 10 front page listings + the map..)

• Use Keyword Rich Title Tags

Title tags are shown in the top left of your browser (way up there opposite of the X to close the program) and are included within the HEADER section of the code within your website.  Keep in mind you only have 64 characters for this tag. When you do a search this is also the BLUE link that shows up in the results.  If you leave this BLANK it will show up on Google as “Untitled”.

• In the Content, Use Keywords early and often

The sooner you jump into the topic with the correct keywords the more relivant Google considers the content.  The idea is within the first 25 words to use the keyword phrase that you want to rank.

• Pictures are a ADDON Not the main thing.

To many times entertainers believe that images should be the MAIN part of the website, and while they are very important if they are the majority of the content. They KILL your rankings. Text is what search engines read and see the most, and text is what they give the most weight to. If your site is ALL Images (because it looks pretty) those’s ok, but understand your site is a “field of dreams” site. Where you’ve built it and HOPING they will come.

• Do NOT (I can’t over emphasis this enough) Build sites only in FLASH

It looks nice, but only the HOME page can be indexed. This means no highly targeted traffic, and the traffic you get won’t be sent directly to the pages they want, but will have to look through your navigation to find it. This doesn’t sound bad until you realize that 95% of visitors would rather go find another site than wait on your site.

I hope these basic concepts of SEO will push you in the right direction and get you going on having a powerful website that ranks well in search results.