Search Engines. Everybody wants to be on them and the nearer to the top the better. Why? Because search engines bring you people who are actually looking for what you sell. It's like the Yellow Pages. People use them when they're ready to buy and if you show up on the top of the list, you're highly likely to get the first chance at the sale.
Now that we've established the importance of getting listed on the search engines, let's look at some of the criteria they use to list you. A book can literally be written on this topic as the criteria vary from search engine to search engine but the following are some of the common ones that can get you where you want to be.
Buy your way in
The fastest and surest way to get onto the search engines and enjoy a guaranteed decent ranking in the top 10 results is to buy your way in. Almost all search engines offer "pay-per-click advertising" or what the industry likes to call PPC. Ranking using this method usually depends on how much you bid on a key word, meaning most search engines use a type of auction system to rank you. While this is not the only option, it must be mentioned so that if you find any of the following daunting or too much work, you're aware that you do have a choice.
To get indexed without paying isn't easy and to get ranked high and to preserve that ranking is a talent in itself, especially since the search engines tend to revise their criteria from time to time. Given the fact that they do revise, although we've touched on this topic before, we too need to revise what we've said before to keep you up-to-date on what's happening in the industry. Now let's look at how to get listed for free.
Repetition of Key Words
First, we need to explain what are key words. Just think of it like this. The words that your potential customers are likely to type in when searching for your product or service are your key words. You need to have these on your web page and the more often the better. For example, if you sell shoes and your store name is Paymore trust me, no one is going to be searching for Paymore. People are likely to search for shoes. This is therefore one of your key words. Of course, you will have the politically correct carrot who doesn't search for shoes but for footwear, meaning this is another key word you want on your website. OK, there will be some people looking for your store in particular and will type in your store name and that's great and this should work just fine too, but needless to say - I hope - your name would obviously be prominent on your website anyway.
Now, can you therefore try to trick the search engine by putting the key words in succession like this, "shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes, and more shoes" so as to ensure a higher ranking than your competitor? As a rule, you should never set out to trick the search engine or anyone else for that matter. The smarter search engines' robots will eventually pick up on what you're doing and boy will they drop you to the bottom of their rankings! That is of course if they don't delete you altogether.
Use Robot-Readable Content
We mentioned robots in the previous paragraph because this is what most search engines use. There are hardly any search engines with staff manually adding websites to their indices. The robots are trained to read text. This means that you should try to use more text on your website than images or flash which they have difficulty reading.
Antiquity
Very important for your ranking is the age of your website. A website bought today will not appear in the search engines tomorrow for free. In fact, the average time to get ranked has gone up to 12-15 months because millions of websites around the world are begging the robots to come look at them. So the earlier you start your website, the higher you will rank, even if it's just one page. This also underlines the importance of getting your website up and running now. If all that separates you from your competitor is who got on the Web first and you both have all of the other criteria in place, the older one will get placed higher.
Updating Frequency
The more frequently you update your website, the higher you will rank. The robots, once they find you and like you, come back at certain intervals to see if you have new content and of course to ensure that you haven't gone out of business.
Your Domain Name
To Google, this doesn't seem to mean too much but to engines like MSN, your name in .com is key. So if your domain name is Matikoor.com and you sell bridal accessories, you could show up high on Google for bridal accessories while on MSN you're likely to be number one for Matikoor. A good strategy is to get both names in .com.
Title
What's the title of your webpage? The search engines pay attention to this too. If you throw in some of your key words there that would also help your ranking.
Links
Was I saving the best for last? Links are extremely important to practically every major search engine, so get as many websites as possible to link to your website. The search engines assume that the more websites linked to yours, the more important it must be and rank you higher.
Unique Content
So we were not saving the best for last because this is the last point on this list and it is not exactly the best but still worth mentioning. Search engines like unique content. This is why parked pages tend to get low rankings if any. What's a parked page? A page with either a standard "coming soon" or "under construction" notice or with a plethora of link ads.
There are more criteria not mentioned above. In fact, some search engines like Google guard their criteria like trade secrets but the above are the main ones that have been tried, tested and proven. So now it's your turn to go try, test and prove.
Aleem Khan is an accredited Internet Expert with the http://www.InternationalInternetAuthority.com which is a safe place to GetYourNameIn.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Aleem_Khan
No comments:
Post a Comment