4 Basic Tips for Increasing your Search Engine Rankings

You have probably avoided dealing with the issue of increasing your search engine rankings in the past because it has a tendency to seem a lot like rocket science.

Fact is, it is essential that your website have a high search engine ranking, you cannot continue to avoid this issue if it is your desire to succeed in business.

The majority of people looking for anything on the Internet find it through search engines such as Yahoo, Google and MSN. So the idea is to optimize your pages for high search engine rankings. You will then attract targeted customers to your website who may make a purchase.

The closer your page comes to the top of the search engine results, the more chance there is of getting targeted traffic to your site. That is why search engine optimization is so important.

You have two choices, you can either submerge yourself in all the SEO information online to try and figure out how to optimize your pages to get higher rankings. Or can make some small but necessary adjustments and more than likely rapidly improve your rankings.

This article takes a look at the basic items you should examine when optimizing your pages.

1) Title Bar on Your Homepage and Each Page of Your Site

The colored bar at the top of your page is the title bar. To increase your search engine rankings, you should include the most relavant keywords or phrases in this bar, one being your company name.

Then check the title bars on all of your other pages. Each page should also have the most important keyword or phrase in the title bar. Do avoid long strings of phrases, keeping them to six words or less. Also, avoid repeating keywords and make sure that identical words are not placed side by side.

2) Your Website Content and HTML Format

The search engines will look at quality content before graphics. Throughout the content you will want to sprinkle your most important keywords. You know, the words people will be typing into the search engines to find your site.

Aim for 250 words a page, but 100 carefully chosen words will be fine. This text is essential for higher search engine ranking. The search engines will not be able to read the text if it is not in HTML format.

If the words on any page of your site can be highlighted, it is in HTML format, if not you will need to have your webmaster change the text into HTML so that your can increase your search engine rankings.

3) Meta Tags

This really is not complicated, just some simple code. Many believe that the meta tags are the key to getting high search engine rankings, however, they really only have a limited effect. You still want to add them just in case the search engine uses meta tags in their ranking formula.

To see if your page is set up with meta tags, click the "view" button on your browser menu bar, and then select "source". A small window will appear revealing all the code used to create the page. The meta tags will appear near the top, for example, it should look something like this: meta name="keywords" content=. Ask your Webmaster to include meta tags if you cannot locate any.

This may not necessarily do much to increase your rankings, but any little boost may help.

4) Link Popularity

Link popularity is very important in terms of search engine ranking. Almost every search engine will use link popularity to rank your site. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites that you have linked to.

If you would like to have some quality sites link to your site, you will be required to request that they exchange links with your site. This takes time and others may not always agree to link to you.

Search engine rankings are very important, however, you do not need to hire a search engine optimization professional to try some of the steps that I have listed above. Try these steps yourself, and remember, increasing your search engine rankings, also means increasing targeted customers to your site.