How to Get Top Search Engine Rankings for Your Web Site

Good content and proper presentation to the engines is important 

The job of the search engine is to find the best sites to present to the person doing a search.  What you need to do then is make sure you site is as good or better at providing the searcher with what they are looking for, and making sure the search engine can determine the quality of your site. 

I can’t tell you what to provide the searcher other than make sure it’s what they are looking for. I can tell you how to present the information to the search engines in a way that they can determine the value and quality of your site. 

High quality content and high quality inbound links 

The search engines have basically two ways of determining your sites ranking.  The first is the content of your site, and the second is the number and quality of the links to your site from other sites. 

Step one would be to produce a high quality website with a lot of high quality useful content that people are searching for.  However, it won’t do you any good if the search engines can’t figure out how good your site is.  You have to present your content in a way that the search engines can use it to determine the quality of the site. 

Let’s take a look at how the search engines figure out what your site is about and how to assign a ranking to it.  Having the best web site on the web won’t do you any good if the search engines can’t figure that out. 

Head section of the web page 

The head section of your web page is the first thing the engines see.  In the head section of your site are some very important elements. The head section contains the meta tags including the title tag and the description tag.  

Importance of the meta title tag 

The title tag tells the search engine what your page is about.  If your title is “John Lund Photography”, the engines will know the page is about John Lund and photography.  If you want to get a high listing when people search for “John Lund” then that is a good title.  But John’s site is a stock photo site and John wants to be ranked high for the keywords “stock photo”.  

John wants to use his site for two purposes; the first being to provide great high-quality stock photos to ad agency’s and people searching for stock photos to use in advertising, and the second to sell advertising on his site. 

Using wordtracker, a keyword research tool, we determined that “funny pictures” and “stock photos” would be his primary target keyword phrases. 

Importance of the description tag. 

The second meta tag in importance is the description tag.  When the search engines display the results it often displays the contents of the description tags under the title. So people decide whether to visit your site by the title and the description.  If you description doesn’t inspire searchers to click through to your site, then getting the high ranking was a waste of time.  

Make sure your description tag accurately reflects what the searcher will find when he gets to your page.  Google and the other engines also use the description tag to help determine what your site is about.

 Keyword tag... not so important

There is also a meta tag for keywords.  Although the engines for the most part don’t use it because of all the keyword stuffing abuse that has occurred, they may still check to see if it is being abused. Don’t stuff a bunch of un-related keywords or repeat keywords. It won’t help and could hurt.  I generally use 5-8 keyword phrases in the keyword tag. 

Body text 

Body text is the next element the engines look at.  If there is little or no body text, the engines won’t be impressed.  When the engine compares your site to your competitors sites, if you have a couple of paragraphs of information, and your competitor has a 800 word page, who do you think will look more important. 

Put 500 to 800 words on a page so that the engines know there is content.  Make sure you have proper grammar and perfect spelling.  The engines are watching.  A page with a bunch of miss-spelled words will not be viewed as a high-quality page.  Also use headings with your keyword phrases worked in.  Keywords in headings are generally given more weight than keywords in body text. 

Don’t stuff extra keywords into your text. Write for humans.  The engines will give a lower weight to body text with too many keywords.  

Photographs and alt image tags 

Search engines can’t determine what a photograph is about from looking at the photo.  The only information available to the engines are the text near the image, the file name of the image, and the alt tag text for the image.  So use a keyword or two in the photo file name, in the alt tag text, and nearby the image.  Again, write for humans. 

Make a sitemap 

Make a sitemap.  Sign up for Google webmaster tools.  Google tells you exactly how to do it.  That way if your navigation proves difficult for the spiders, the sitemap will make sure they can index all of your pages. 

Incoming links to your site 

Get links from other sites.  The engines use the number and quality of links that point to your site as another way to gauge the importance of your site.  Links from spammy and low quality sites will not do you much good.  Links from related sites of high quality will do you a lot of good.  If you have a high-quality site with information that people want, then other sites will link to you. 

Article marketing to obtain one way inbound quality links 

One good way to get links is to do some article marketing.  Write some 500-800 word articles and submit them to the online article directories.  You will get long-term quality links, and you get to choose the anchor text in the links.  

Anchor and link text 

The search engines look at the anchor text in the link, the text around the link, the link text, the page the link is on, and the site the link is on to determine the quality and topic of the link. 

Quantity of content 

Your site needs a lot of content.  If the engines are comparing your site with others, and your site has 20 pages of great content, while the others have 50 or 100 pages of equally good content, which site do you think will be given a higher ranking?  Yep, the bigger site will win. 

You should probably shoot for at least 100 pages of related content.  Use the various elements as they were designed for i.e. title tags, alt tags, description tag, and keyword tags.  Make sure your grammar is proper and there are no miss-spelled words. Provide plenty of body text and use headings. 

Keyword tools for keyword phrases

Use a keyword tool when composing keyword phrases because if you use keyword phrases that are not searched for then they won’t help you get traffic.  

Time and patience 

It takes time for the engines to trust you.  Brand new sites usually need a year or so before the engines really begin to trust your site, so patience is necessary.  Early on you may get some traffic from long-tailed keyword phrases, but it will take time to rise to the top for the really popular search terms where you have lots of competition.

 There you have it.  Follow these instructions and in time your site will rise to the top of the search engine result pages.