Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking
(C) Michael Rasmussen
All Rights Reserved

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.

Michael Rasmussen is a successful Internet Marketing Consultant and
author of many top-selling eBooks. Michael has been marketing online
since the early days and he knows what it takes to make money and
succeed online. Stop by his Web site and subscribe to his Free
monthly newsletter full strategies and techniques for successful web
site promotions that can help YOU!

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