WEBSITES

How to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

As web consultants, we're often asked how to get results from search engines. We've been tracking the evolution of search engines over the last several years, and much has changed. Gone are the days of shady companies offering high rankings for even higher prices. The spam tactics they devised were built on the false assumption that trickery gets results. Search engines are smarter than that now. Today content is king, as well it should be. If your company wants to be number one in search rankings, it has to actually be the best.

Introduction
Search engines have "robots" that read and catalog the code and text of all the web pages they find. They find web pages mainly via links. Think of a link as a sort of phone number to your site, and realize that the web has no phone book. Now let's say you want to find all the phone numbers in your town. What you can do is call the people you know, and have them call everyone they know, and so on until everyone has been contacted. This is essentially how the robots search the web; they start with a website and use the links on that site to find other sites, and use those sites' links to find other sites. This cycle is repeated at lightning speed every day by search engine robots. They remember all the words on your site so that your site can be found when someone searches for particular words. If your site contains those words, a link to your site is displayed.

Your site's rank depends on factors that vary from engine to engine, but are most often some combination of traffic, link popularity (the number of links to your site from others), age, tags, and the wealth, freshness, and clarity of your content.

Content
There’s no substitute for good content. Well-written copy is the greatest asset to your website's success with both users and search engines. Search engines have "robots" that read the code and text of all the web pages they find, so if your page is about plumbing, then it's a good idea to have the word "plumbing" in your text fairly frequently. This is easy to overlook, because so much information comes from images, and so many assumptions are made about a company’s business from sources other than just the text of the website.

When composing the text of your site, think of all the words and phrases you think people will search for in order to find you, and create sentences around them.

Links
The more people that know you, the easier you can be found. If you have links to your site on other people's pages, you become easier to find by both potential clients and by search engine robots. So, exchange links with people the way you might exchange business cards. Having a Links Page on your site is very advantageous, as it generally helps to increase traffic.

HTML Title tags
It often helps to have important keywords placed in the <title> tag of your page (the text displayed at the very top of your browser, on a blue line just before your browser's name). A brief list of keywords can be advantageous to search engine rankings. For example, our title tag is as follows:

<title>Epoch Online : Websites, Networks, Applications, Web Design, Programming, Little Rock, Arkansas<title>

Very often, a company's name is not a keyword. So putting the most important keywords to your business at the very top is helpful.

Submit to search engines
Search engines will find your site if you have links to your site on other websites. But if you don't want to wait for a search engine to find you, or you don't have any links at all, then you can directly submit your web address (URL) to most major search engines.

A few of the major search engines offer this indexing service for free, but without any guarantee that your URL will be found. Unfortunately, very often it may take several weeks or months before the robots get around to visiting you. And with the proliferation of websites jockeying for position on search returns today, the world has changed. Getting into the search engines today is relatively easy - click here and we'll submit you to Google, MSN, Lycos and others. Getting a high rank for certain high-traffic keywords is the hard part, however. Contact us if you'd like to optimize your site for better search engine visibility.

Meta tags
Meta tags are hidden items on your site that only search engine robots can read. To view the tags, go to a web page, right click on your screen, and select "view source." A window will display all the code that creates the page.

The two most important meta tags are the "Description" tag and the "Keywords" tag. The Description tag should be a brief, effective, one-sentence summary of your site. The Keywords tag should be a list of words and concepts integral to your business. Here are some examples:

<meta name="description" content="Epoch Online is a business technology solutions provider with offices in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Dallas, Texas, focused on web design, applications and networks for businesses across the Mid-South.">

<meta name="keywords" content="Arkansas web design, Arkansas website design, Little Rock web design, web designers, Arkansas computer applications, business technology solutions, solutions provider, technology consultant, Internet marketing, Internet advertising, St. Louis, Memphis, Dallas">

These often make your site easier for search engine robots to classify. The Description tag is usually displayed in the search return as a brief summary of your site, while the Keyword tag helps get exposure for important words and phrases that may not be actually be written in your site's text. Today, these tags are far less valuable than in the past. Many engines completely ignore them. Nevertheless, they are still an important part of creating a well-rounded website.

Conclusion
Good content, links, submissions, and tags aren't guarantees of success in improving your rankings, but they are by far your best bets. These methods are, however, the most effective measures toward being easily found. They are also the basics; Epoch Online knows a good bit more, so contact us and we'll get you on the path to targeted results.

Post Script
A word to the wise for those of you who want to try this at home: search robots are designed to think like people, so they know when your website is for real and when they're being tricked. For every "spam" tactic, there has been an upgrade in search logic - most search engines recognize excessive or repeated keyword tags, redirect commands from other URLs, doorway pages, hidden text and fake pages of random keywords. Most good search engines penalize these tactics, so beware.