Want a better website ranking?

By: Taya Lawrence | Posted: 04th December 2004

Want a better website ranking?

By Clare Lawrence 8th June 2004



Almost everyone wants to improve their rankings in the search engines, also known as Search engine results placement. How to do it? The web is full of services offering to submit your website to 1,000's of search engines and directories for $19.99.



As you might imagine nearly all of these services produce very disappointing results.



How should I go about it? I focus on Google, the leading search engine as it currently accounts for about 56% of global web searches. I have also learnt by painful and expensive experience but got there.



Play by the rules



First things first. Google is fighting a war against spammers, those who attempt to artificially inflate their SERPS. To be successful in the long run you need to keep to the guidelines. Google helpfully publishes these at www.google.com/guidelines.htm



If you have spammed your site in an attempt to get to the top, then perhaps now is the time to de-spam it.



Content is King



Search engines are looking for content that is relevant, the results shown from a search sort in to order the sites by order of relevance. The more a page is about a subject the better its ranking will be.



Decide on what keywords you want to rank under.



Then use these keywords on a page regularly, this increases it's a pages relevance, but not if you get too carried away, that's spamming.



Links



Google's PageRank technology measures the importance of a site by the number of pages that link to it. The greater the number of inward links your site has then the more valuable its page are viewed to be. Particularly important is the use of keywords as anchor text, for example the phrase Domain Name Registration when linked to a page about domain names, gives a boost to the destination site.



The content of the page the links comes from is also an important consideration, as are the absolute number of links. The more out-going links, the less valuable is the benefit passed on.



Avoid links pages if you can, Google is getting better and better at spotting lists of links.



Directories



Getting a listing in directories is important but only a few are really valuable.

>

The importance ones, being:-



Dmoz – A free directory but very slow to be updated by its human editors, powers around 250 search services.

Yahoo – Increasingly challenging Google.


JoeAnt

Gimpsy

Business.com

Allthebizz.com

Skaffe<



Put it to work



You now know what it takes, the difficult part now begins, you have take a good look at the quality of your current content, and start building your links. How long it takes to get good SERPS will depend on how competitive your chosen phrases are.



If you follow my advice here, you will get there; it takes time, and be patient it will work.



I wish you the best of luck, if you want advice then get in touch.




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Tags: domain names, google, domain name registration, phrase, search engines and directories, search engine results, serps, relevance, anchor text, global web, web searches, spamming, benefi