Search Engine Guide
How to get better search rankings
There are more than 80 factors that affect your search rankings and probably 8 million pages online about what to do and not do to grab better rankings. For the most part we look to Google for guidelines because Google has more search traffic than all other search engines combined. Google also has MANY tools to help the webmaster set up a site from the ground up that will rank higher than others.
There are several areas that affect rankings on Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL - the largest online engines. Site layout and design, content and inbound and outbound links are the biggest factors in ranking. To rank well you must understand what the spiders are looking for and what their purpose in life really is. Spiders are automated "bots" sent out from the engines to crawl around your website and report back what THEY think your site is all about.
When a visitor comes to the search engine and enters a search phrase, the engine runs through the spider reports and shows the visitor the sites that are RELEVANT to that search term based on the spider's analysis. If the term is "what vitamins are best for children" a sites having that EXACT term in their pages will be ranked higher than sites with the term "children's vitamins". Both sites may be shown, but the site with the exact search phrase will be higher on the search results page than any others.
Keyword Research
Based on this, the first research that should be done is finding out what people are looking for when they search. There are many tools and programs online that will help you determine what keywords you should include on your site. Google has a very handy keyword tool that uses Google only searches.
Another handy site is Google Fight.com On this site you merely pit two keywords or keyphrases against each other. This is especially useful for finding the difference between something like "vitamins" and "supplements". This tool only uses Google results.
Wordtracker.com is one of the more comprehensive keyword research sites using results from many engines. It is also useful in planning PPC campaigns.
For a great article with even more keyword research sites and how to do good keyword research, check out Five Steps to Effective Keyword Research
Using Keywords
Now that you have your keywords, how do you use them? First and foremost be SURE to include them in the page title. There is an art to writing good page titles and descriptions which is explored in the Meta Tag section of this guide. But the spiders don't just take your word for what your site is about. Merely putting the keywords in the meta tags won't get you a good ranking if the rest of the site doesn't support those keywords.
Your page content must use those keywords in the copy. But don't just toss them in randomly. Remember to balance the use of your keywords with readability. Ranking high for a term will not do you any good if the copy doesn't strike a chord with the visitor! Copy needs to be read by both spiders and real people to be useful.
Here are some other places to use your keywords
File names - name your pages with keywords, not names like "page 1" "mypage" or "welcome"
Image names - save your images with a keyword file name not "pic1", "house" or "image237771234"
Alt tags - USE ALT TAGS ON EVERY IMAGE - and be sure to include keywords in that tag!
CSS - if you use CSS on your page, name styles and classes with a keyword, not just "box 1", "headline2" or "big-text"
Check out this article for a great quick guide to optimization A 10 Minute Search Engine Optimization
Now let's move on to the next step - Site Layout and Design.