Search Engine Ranking

If your website is far down in the list on search engines, it is time to do some search engine optimization.

First of all, you need to have codes called META tags in your website. These allow search engines to find your website and list it in the directory in the first place. Without these, your site is just hiding, and people will not be able to easily find it.

These META tags also play an important role in your actual rank on the search engine. Writing correct tags will ensure you a higher place in search engines.

META Title

The META title tells search engines what the title of your website is. You may place your business name in the title, but it is more important to place relevant content in the title. For example, if you own Sheep and Things Farm and you sell wool and wool products, a good META title for your site might read "Sheep and Things Farm - wool and wool products for sale". Not only does this help your placement, but when people searching view this title, they automatically know what you sell. If you just put "Sheep and Things Farm" as the title, they have to guess at what you sell.

META Description

Again, make this relevant to each page. Using the above example, the home page META Description might read "Sheep wool, and wool products for sale". Individual pages should be tailored to fit the content on that page.

META Keywords

Despite the common misconception, META keywords are probably the least important META tag you can put on your site. They can be helpful, but you must make sure the keywords are relevant to your website and the individual page. If your website is about sheep, do not include things like "horse", "tax service", or anything else that does not fit your website. This can actually lower your rankings. At the very least, it will make for some upset visitors to your website.

Content

Now that you have the correct META tags, we come to the most important part of search engine ranking. You have to have valuable content in your website. Make sure that each and every page you have has content on it. Do not leave a page blank with an "under construction" sign on it. This can lower your ranking, and it will not do anything to help it at the very least. Include more than just a sentence or two on each page. If you have a picture page, put descriptions with the pictures (alt tags). If you have an about me page, make sure you really write about you. Make a nice write up about yourself, not just a list of things like your address, your name, and your age. Include information that viewers want to see. Even if you do not have an actual information page, you can have a few trivia facts relating to your line of business or products scattered (in a neat fashion) around your website.

Design

Believe it or not, search engines actually do care about the design of your website. If it is hard for people to navigate your website, it will be even harder for search engines to navigate your website. If this happens, they can only go off of your META tags to rank your website. This can severely harm your rankings. If you have a frames page, make sure each page has links to the rest of your website, not just the navigation frame. If you are using buttons or other graphics for links, make sure you have text links as well. Search engines cannot read graphic links like they can read text links. FLASH animations, while they may look neat, do nothing for your ranking. They can actually hurt your ranking if you are not careful. Some search engines cannot read FLASH animations, so if all you have on the page is a FLASH animation, the search engine reads that as having a nearly blank page with no real content. Seperate CSS stylsheets and the use of PHP includes can really help your ranking by moving all of the layout coding to different files, letting the search engine to go right to the content. Your visitors will see it all as one page, but the search engine will see it is a page filled with relevant content and little extra, which helps with ranking.