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[W237]Website Search Engine Ranking

by Gillian Meier, Gil

Surprisingly, many companies do not realise the significance of having their website developed and design to be read and understood by both search engines and human visitors. Companies get blind-sighted by designers that impress them with flashy presentations, impressive creative's and clever navigation techniques.

There are many impressive websites entering cypersace daily. Impressive splashy entry pages and dazzling creative's demonstrate the creativity of the web designer, but unfortunately these websites do very little for the websites rankings in search engine results. Very often, the only objective that is achieved by these types of websites is that the person or company that designed the website is has unquestionable creative talent. As brilliant as these websites may look, unfortunately many of these are simply doing absolutely nothing for the company. It is surprising how few web designers today are taught the skill of optimising the websites that they design for search engine rankings.

From the start of the web development project, a website owner should commission an experienced search engine optimiser to prepare the website brief for the design company, thereby defining those essential elements that should be incorporated. Without properly configuring the page architecture, and content a website stands very little chance of being positioned anywhere of significance on search engine results pages.

Search engines apply hundreds of variables to their very scientific formula for ranking websites. Thus, website owners, web designers and marketers should take cognisance of the fact that it is simply not good enough to publish a fancy looking website onto the Internet and expect it to start attracting and converting customers in the hope of producing income from their new online presence.

It takes a substantial amount of research, skill and careful planning to create a website that will be recognised by search engines as relevant enough to rank anywhere on the first page of results. This alone does not guarantee that that the websites offers a user experience that satisfies the researcher's needs and eventually may convert the researcher into a customer.

There is no instant recipe for getting ranked highly on search engines. It is a process that requires a great deal of planning, editing and monitoring in order first climb into the top ranking positions and then to try to remain there. With the algorithms changing at will, there is no one technique ?cast in stone' that will guarantee top rankings. If you want to reap the rewards, you need to invest time and effort into properly researching your competitor's position, and then carefully plan a strategy that will hopefully outrank them, while at the same time attracting niche targeted audiences.

Beware of companies promising to have websites ranked in the top ten results pages within weeks. Although some websites do rank much faster than others, those companies practicing spamming techniques may get websites ranking in a matter of weeks but, in return they can expect to be dropped from the rankings ? or even worse, be blacklisted by the search engines within as little as six weeks.

Companies should be careful to approach search engine optimisation from an ethical, spam-free perspective if they want to thrive in this very competitive environment. Until such time that a website ranks highly, there certainly is a place for paid advertising (pay-per-click).

There are many things involved when doing seo for your website. Some of these include the following:

Designing your website
This is a very important thing to consider when doing seo. This is because the better your site is optimised for the major search engines, the better your chance will be of you getting an improved ranking for your chosen keywords within the major search engines. To optimise your site you will need to use metatags, which contains your chosen keywords. You will also need to design your site so that it is not just full of images.

You will need to add some good quality content to your web pages in the form of text. When writing text/information for your web pages you must consider using your chosen keywords throughout the content so that it has a good keyword density for your chosen keywords. It would probably be best to aim for a keyword density of around 7% - 9%. If you have a keyword density any higher than this, then the search engines may penalize you for spamming their search engines with your chosen keywords.

The navigation of your site is also very important as when people arrive at your site you will want them to easily be able to navigate through your sites content. If they can't do this then they may leave your site and go to another one, which could even be one of your competitors.

Link Popularity
Link popularity is very important in making your website rankings improve. This is because the more sites that link to your site the more important your site looks to the major search engines. But when getting sites to link to yours it is best to make sure that your link is on a page of a site that is based on the same topic as your site. Doing it this way will benefit your site much better than you having your links on pages of other sites that has topics that have nothing to do with your sites topic.

So you are probably now wondering how you can get sites linking back to your site. Well there are many ways of doing this. Some of these include the following:

1. Doing link exchanges
Doing link exchanges with other sites is a good way to increase your sites link popularity.

2. Writing reprint articles and submitting them to article directories
Writing reprint articles that is on the same topic as your site and then submitting them to free reprint article submission sites is one of the best ways for you to increase your link popularity plus visitors. This is because you are writing an article about your sites topic and then you are placing your sites link in the authors' resource box, which then means that your link will be on the same page as information about the same topic as your site. Placing your sites link in your articles also means that it is a one-way link, which is an advantage to link exchanges.

Some article directories have so many articles that they also include an article achieve so that your article can stay in view of the major search engines for some time and also so that you can easily navigate the articles more quickly by using the achieve. For example, the articles directory at: http://www.simplysearch4it.com/article/articledir.php has an article achieve at: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com , which lists all of the articles listed within the SimplySearch4it! database in an easy to navigate and read format.

3. Using forums and including your sites link in your signature
Using some forums will increase your sites link popularity, but using these is not as good as using some other forms of getting links to your site. This is because some forums use some sort of redirect so that the search engines can't see your link in the forum.

4. Adding your sites link to free to submit general and specialty web directories
This is a slow, but good way of increasing your sites link popularity and also increasing your sites visitors. This is because many web directories have good rankings within the major search engines, which means that your site will also benefit from it.

5. Writing press releases
This is a very good way to increase your sites traffic and link popularity. As longs as you can write a good press release you should see a good increase in your websites traffic and link popularity.

Article Source : Pg. 17

About Author

Both Gillian Meier & Jonathan White are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Gillian Meier has sinced written about articles on various topics from Internet Marketing, Personal Desktop and Family Travel. Blue Magnet Web Intellect is an Internet Marketing Training and Consulting company in South Africa offering Search Engine Marketing and SEO training and consulting services to new and existing website owners, developers and marketers. Visit. Gillian Meier's top article generates over 33100 views. to your Favourites.

Jonathan White has sinced written about articles on various topics from Affiliate Programs, Real Estate and Insurance for Business. . Jonathan White's top article generates over 74000 views. to your Favourites.