The methods employed to increase your search engine

rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have

probably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here to tell

you - the time has come to face your website! A high search

engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you

have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your

business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this

issue.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on

the Internet find websites through search engines such as

Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages

for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted

customers to your site who will be more than likely to make

a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine

results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your

website. That's what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all the technical information

available online to figure out how to optimize your web

pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few

simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments,

and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The

first item you should examine is the title bar on your

homepage.

The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page.

Look at the words that appear there when you access your

home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on

your homepage's title bar should include the most important

keywords or phrases, one of which would include your

company name.

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on

the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page

of your site should contain the most important keywords and

phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very

long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or

less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title

bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to

each other.

The next item to put under your microscope is your website

content. Search engines generally list sites that contain

quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The

text on your site must contain the most important keywords

- the words that potential customers will be typing into

search engines to find your site.

Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is

not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100

carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high

ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However,

the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning

that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your

cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able

to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not

highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case,

ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in

order to increase your search engine rankings.

Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this

sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is

really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags

are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality,

they only have a limited effect. Still, it's worth adding

them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags

in their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must

access the code. To do this, click the "view" button on the

browser menu bar, and select "source." This will pull up a

window revealing the underlying code that created the page.

If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of

the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta

name="keywords" content=. If you do not find code that

reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This

may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any

little boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a

factor that is extremely important in terms of search

engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link

popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based

on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your

links page.

If you type in "free link popularity check" in a popular

search engine, the search engine will then show you what

sites are linked to your site. In the case that there

aren't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites

that are linked up have low search engine rankings,

consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially,

this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that

they exchange links with your site. Of course, this

requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want

to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only

boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more

quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a

successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out

and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking

some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can't

boost your rankings yourself. Don't ever ignore this

all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the

higher your search engine ranking, the more quality

customers will be directed your way.