Resources Zone

To improve your website’s search engine ranking, you must plan its optimization strategy wisely. You achieve this by feeding the search engines properly. Learn the methods that these search engines use for the purpose of ranking the web pages. This will enable you to achieve goods rankings for your website without resorting to spam.

Develop a List of Strategic Keywords and Position Them Well
Since inter-net users search websites by typing keywords, it is very important to develop a list of strategic keywords that will direct the users to your website. Ideally, each strategic keyword must be two or more words long.

Once you develop your strategic keywords, carefully plan their positioning on your web pages. It is important that the keywords appear in the crucial locations on your website. In the absence of perfect keyword positioning, even an otherwise relevant web page has chances to suffer from poor rankings. Web experts suggest that a company must restrict the word limit of the first paragraph on its website to 300 words, 8% of which must be the keywords. Use the keywords in the page headline, if possible.

Develop Proper Web Design and Understand the Implications of Layout
Place crucial information related to your website in text. Don’t use tables to layout text and imagery, as the search engines tend to break tables apart while reading the web pages. Avoid using Java Scripts, since they might have the same effect as tables.

Meta Tags
Consider using Meta Tags. Meta Tags are used to define the content of a site and are understandable by the web. Meta Tags do not appear when a web page is viewed through a browser, but they sit silently on the head element of a page waiting for the search engines to look at them.

Some search engines use Keywords Tags and Description Tags as Meta Tags. Keyword Tags refer to the keywords that a search engine uses to locate your web page. Description tags describe the website that the search engine presents to introduce your website to the users upon locating it.

Meta Tags can be read by some search engines, But others cannot read Meta Tags. You should thus avoid overrating them while designing your web page.

Use HTML Text and Links
Avoid using graphics to present large sections of content, since the search engines fail to read them, thereby reducing the relevance of your site. Use HTML text wherever possible. Add HTML hyperlinks to the homepage to lead the users to the major pages of your website. A site map with text links enables the search engines to locate pages within your website. Avoid using symbols as your URLs, as the search engines tend to ignore it. Above all, submit the key pages that summarize your website to give the search engines alternatives for crawling.

Importance of Reviewing Your Work
In order to maintain the high ranking of your website, continuously check its performance in all the search engines and check the listing of your pages regularly. Resubmit your site if you make significant changes to it.

David Gass is President of Business Credit Services, Inc. His company publishes afree weekly e-newsletter on Small Business Consulting at their web site http://www.smallbusinessconsulting.com

Tags : search engines, optimization strategy, strategic keywords, w