The methods used to increase your search engine rank may seem like rocket science to you, which has lead you to probably avoid dealing with this issue. But, the time has come to face your website or blog! A high search engine ranking for your website or your blog 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 using the search engines.

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 more than likely make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the amount of 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 on the internet to figure out how to optimize your web pages so that they achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see an improvement in your ranking quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.

The title bar is the colored bar located 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 the titlebar of your homepage 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 long keyword lengths, keeping them to five words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that the same keywords 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 flashy graphics. The text on your site must contain your most important keywords; the words that potential customers will be typing into the search engines to find your site. Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not what you want due to your website design, aim for at least 100 carefully selected 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 format. In this case, ask your webmaster or whomever to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.

Next we come to what is called meta tags. This probably 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 determine if your page is set up with meta tags, you must have 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 or whomever 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. Backlinks, one-way links, any kind of link from an authority site 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 you 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 or you try it yourself, 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.

Lawren Smith is founder and creator of Quest4Success Marketing, LLC, where online entrepreneurs can learn proven marketing strategies and cutting edge techniques to grow their business. For more information on search engine optimization, visit LawrenSmith.com blog or visit: Increase Searach Engine Rank Revealed

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