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So, you’ve got yourself a great looking website full of all kinds of information that is going to change the world, if only somebody could see all this great, life-changing stuff you’ve got going on. You search for something on a major search engine and millions of pages turn up, but rarely do you ever look beyond the first few pages for anything. Why is that the case? Why is it that people rarely go beyond those first couple of pages? Well, you can spend time pondering an answer to the question, or you can just not worry about it, and do what you can to increase the rank of your page in the search engine results.
People are always asking how to get their page ranked higher, or ranked well, or even ranked at all. There are a few major search engines out there, but the major one is Google, so that’s going to be where you want your page to be ranked the highest. Some of the methods involved with getting your page ranked higher can get pretty complex and even involve some deeply rooted mathematical algorithms. The best way to increase your rank is through some basic search engine optimization techniques that are fairly simple to get the hang of. If you don’t know anything about SEO, then you might be surprised by how some of it actually works.
You know, back in the day before any of this stuff really took off, all you had to do to get your webpage ranked the highest was to fill your page with popular search words. It didn’t even matter what your page was about, if you just filled it with hidden text that had popular search words then you increased your page rank in the search engines. Google and the other search engines have nixed that routine by making things a little more complex. Sure, it makes things a little more difficult for you to figure out, but it actually benefits you in the long run because it better directs the audience to what they’re looking for.
So, the days of cheating the system by filling up a page with popular search words is over, and now the best way to increase your rank is really through having quality content. Having legitimate, useful, quality content that is relevant to your site will help SEO initially and it will also significantly help with the rest of the techniques you can use to get your page viewed more often. While you have relevant, quality content, you need to update it. If you have a website and it’s been weeks since you put any new information on it, then you’re hurting yourself.
Increasing your page rank is important because it really has to do with targeting your audience. It’s sort of a backwards thing, when you think about it. In other forms of marketing you’re sending stuff out, you’re mailing out ads, or sending emails, but in this case your audience, your potential sales are really coming to you, so it’s up to you to make yourself as visible, viable and approachable as possible. There are a lot of things you can do to your site to make it more visible. It’s probably not necessary that you do a complete overhaul, but there are some tweaks and fine tuning techniques that you can utilize to really help out. The title bar, for example, is a simple thing that you might need to edit or tweak to improve your rankings. The title bar is what appears on the browser tag and editing this to give it more relevance is going to help your page. The name of your company is probably the way to go here and hopefully that name has something to do with your business and isn’t so vague that you can’t gather anything from the name alone. This tweak should be edited on every page contained in your website. Don’t go overboard, but make sure the words or phrases you’re using in the title bar are something that can be found in the text of that page.
As mentioned before, it’s all about your content. Now, keep in mind that we’re talking about ranking your page and getting it visible on the search engines. We’re not talking about marketing techniques within your site, this is solely about page ranking. The more relevant your content is, the more like it is going to be seen. A ton of graphics aren’t going to help you as much, however the titles of the images, the tags, are going to help your rankings. There is a general consensus on how to approach content and this is based on mathematical formulas that the major search engines use to provide the best search results possible. If you have a hard time believing this idea that it’s all about content, think of it from the perspective of the search engine people. Google wants to give you the best search results possible because they want you to use Google.
So, it’s said that you should take a look at your website or business or product or whatever it is you’ve got working for you, and select anywhere from one to eight keywords, or phrases, that are highly relevant to what you’re doing, or what you think people might be searching for that would lead them to you and get them to purchase something. Now, don’t load you pages with these words. Years ago that probably would have worked, but that’s not working today and that’s not how the value of Google stock has risen like it has.
You should have around 250 to 500 words of relevant content on every page. Here’s the trick, those keywords you came up with, you want to have what’s being called a 1% relevancy. In other words, if you take all the words you have in your body of content, you want 1% of that content to be made up of the keyword you decided to invoke in that content. This is not hard or complicated. If you are the one creating content for your site, then just come up with content and try to do it without even thinking about this. Just create content and make the content informational and useful. Then go back and see how you did and edit from there.
Keeping your content under control is a pretty simple thing to do. There are other important ranking aspects that involve meta tags, and opinions vary on their importance. They do increase your search ranks, there is no doubt about that, but how much they increase is debatable, yet still worth looking into. One of the major keys to getting your page seen is your link popularity techniques. This is said to be the number one way you get ranked. It’s based on the links in your website. This might be the most difficult aspect of the whole thing because it requires you to contact other site managers and the exchange of links. It’s not just a matter of putting up links on your page, it’s a matter of getting the other pages to link to you. It’s probably something that’s more down the road for you as you increase exposure. Or, perhaps you’ve got a great product and you can get other people pretty excited about it.
Whatever your approach, just make sure you approach getting ranked at all. It’s really important to being seen and making sales. Stay on top of the trends because the way pages get ranked has really evolved and is still evolving. If you get a chance to talk to somebody who is highly educated in SEO, they’ll tell you that it changes almost daily. But you can do your best to nail the basics.
