Three Ways To Get Higher Web Rankings!

By Phil & Janet Winter
Posted Friday, October 15, 2004

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Three Ways to Get Higher Web Rankings!

By Phil & Janet Winter, Owners of Web Design Partners

For anyone who has spent time trying improve their web ranking with search engines, you’ve probably come to the conclusion that success requires being in league with the Prince of Darkness. You may have thoughtfully developed keywords for your site, but when you type in your keywords, “lugubrious lotharios,” your site doesn’t appear on the first page, nor the first ten pages, and you have no interest in seeing if it appears in the next 3,426,873 results.

While Search Engine Optimization may appear to be a black art, and the logic of the search engines cannot – with any degree of certainty – be ascertained, there are things you can do to help the situation. Search engines send out “crawlers” that literally go through web sites looking for and indexing phrases and key words. The logic used changes regularly, so the hot technique today, may not work tomorrow. There are, however, some general principles, that when put into practice consistently, should help your ranking. We’ll discuss three, relatively non-technical, ideas for improving your ranking!

1. Don’t spam the search engine!

There are any number of tricks that web designers can pull to try to gain a rankings advantage. This is known as spamming the search engine. Search engines are pretty smart devices, and they don’t like to be fooled. Spamming techniques rarely work, and if they do, they won’t work for long. If the search engine thinks it is being spammed, it may not index your site at all! If your web designer is engaged in such nefarious practices, tell him to stop, or change designers.

2. Does your home page text “sell” your business? Do you have home page text?

Your home page text really has two roles. (You DO have home page text, right?) First, it should help the search engines give you a high ranking to meaningful searches. Secondly, it needs to sell your product or service. Oddly, these two roles may not always be compatible. Going too far to attract search engines can result in cumbersome, redundant, and scrambled syntax. On the other hand, your beautifully crafted prose that glowingly describes your business could get a big yawn from the search engines. You must strike a balance between getting in your keywords, while providing strong copy that gets customers to buy. Your text should focus on meeting the customer’s needs, not describing your business. Make this text “keyword rich” without being overly redundant or making your high school English teacher retch.

Creating this text is not easy. That’s why there are copy writers that specialize in writing for the web. If you’re struggling with your copy, a professional web copy writer could be a wise investment.

3. Do you have lots of links?

Search engines like links because – in their wisdom – they represent a more active, more important site. While all links are good, reciprocal links are best. That’s where your site contains a link to another site which contains a link back to yours. So make sure you have links – hopefully reciprocal – to your business partners, affiliates, and other related sites. Again, going overboard with meaningless links may be considered spamming!

Don’t expect miracles overnight, but if you watch your hit counter, you may be pleasantly surprised! And it won’t involve the Prince of Darkness.

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