The purpose of optimizing your web pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site
who will be more than likely ready 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 all about.
But the things you have to do to optimize your site
may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably
avoided dealing with this issue.
Well whether you like it or not, I have to tell you –
the time has come for you to face your website!
The fact is that if your business is going to succeed online,
your site has to be search engine optimized.
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 home page’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 that particular 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 web site’s 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, don’t forget 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 format.
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 a science fiction book,
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.
