Your site’s placement in search engines can be critical to the success of your business. Research shows that sites that appear in the first ten places in search engine results receive five- to ten times more traffic as do lower-ranking sites.

Whether you operate a web-based shop, non-profit site, forum, blog or web portal, the key to higher traffic and more business is top rankings on the Internet Search Engines. Simply having a site on the web does not guarantee traffic.

Better search engine placement is an important part of Internet marketing today. It involves precise methods which begin with a proper foundation. And it is a necessary investment for any company that wants to realize a solid ROI on business.

To test how well your own company ranks, try searching for some keywords related to your industry where you would like to rank on the first page of a search, and note how you rank.

Once you have a web site optimized, it is important to revisit the site every month or so to check on its rankings. You can also research what your competition is doing (whether they are climbing above you) and revise your site to make sure that you are taking advantage of the best keywords and key phrases. Try to maximize the amount of text you have on your site as well (but make sure it is useful text, not just text for the sake of text). Beef up the number of in-bound links also. Once your web site is complete and optimized for the search engines, the work is not over. It is an on-going process because your competition is always out there trying to get higher rankings. And if you are not intermittently checking and improving your own site, then your rankings will inevitably slip as your competition does more work and they rise above you.

We hear this a lot: "You optimized my web site last week, submitted to search engines why haven't my rankings improved?" The customer who has shelled out their hard earned money to have their web site improved for the purpose of better rankings is naturally eager to see tangible results. Unfortunately... this is not an overnight process by any means. Search engine optimization is a constantly evolving technology. As the search engines improve their processes, so does the tactics of optimizing web sites.

So don't think of it like: your web site is fixed and posted one day and the higher rankings are visible the next day. Patience is indeed a virtue when you are waiting for your search engine optimization dollars to pay off. And keep the process going or those wonderful top spots will slip away in no time.

Website Description and Website Content

Creating the right Website Description for Your Website Contents

Although many people prefer modern Web design in FLASH with lots of JAVA applets and CSS and they might think that the old-fashioned, plain HTML, text based web design is something that belongs to the history, the truth, regarding to the search engine optimization is far more different.

For most of the Search Engine Spiders, those pages are not readable. Images are not readable too. Neither are Adobe PDF documents (although there's now some beta version of spiders who can read PDF documents). Most of JAVA applets also are not readable, and indexing of Dynamic ASP, PHP and HTML pages if their contents change very often, could be avoided as well.

So, in order to achieve better search engine placement for your website, avoid all of above mentioned new fashion styles, and create in pure old text HTML based pages as much as possible.

If you are offering downloading of PDF files, be sure that you also have a text based version, or a least a short overview of what's in the PDF files.

If there is a text converted into pictures such as JPG or GIF, be sure to include ALT description tags for them.

Many experienced Web designers are offering to the visitors both HTML and FLASH pages at the entrance of their Website. Not only because they are concerned about dial-up modem users and their narrow bandwidth, but also to assure indexing of their Website to the Search Engines Spiders.

The Content of Your website must be meaningful, no matter whether your site is a Web Shop or just your personal or family site, or education site, a forum etc.

As more of plain text is in your site, the index and probably the ranking will be better. A Website with lot of text, with many pages whose number rapidly increases through a long period of time will be welcomed by search engines and ranked well.

But, there is no an end of story. You must also Submit Your Site to the Search Engines not only with the right, carefully chosen keywords, but also with precisely defined "Site Description".

Site Description must be short, concise and focused on the most important content of your website.

Your Website Description will be checked and compared with your Keywords and with the entire content of your Website. If the relevance is high then there are more chances that your website will be ranked high. If your website's Keywords, Site Description and Content do not match each other, there is a chance that your website will be considered as "spam".

So, be careful in selecting the right Website Description with which you will submit your Website to the Search Engines.

It is also important that there is a lot of Keywords through your entire Website. However, be careful... Too frequent mentioning of Keywords will also be considered as possible "spam".

And, it is always a good idea to offer some "free stuff" on your site. Search Engines and Spiders just love them...

Links: Search Optimization Tips  |  Web Designing Tips