Improve your search engine ranking17 November 2004
Getting a high ranking on leading search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Amazon's A9 is the priority when trying to increase traffic to your website.
Here are a few of the many ways you can improve your ranking:
- Get your keywords right. The more carefully you populate your site with relevant keywords, the more opportunities there will be for search engines to find it. You can check your level of keywording against other sites with this free tool
- Don't neglect your metadata. This is information that the search engines can see, but visitors to your pages can't. It includes descriptions, keywords and image captions. Find out how to use metadata with this useful guide.
- Work on your link popularity. The more websites that link to yours, the higher your site will appear in search results. Try contacting non-competing, related businesses and persuade them to put a link to you on their site. The online business network ecademy lets you contact thousands of businesses around the world.
- Don't try to fool the search engines - it may backfire. Overloading your website with popular keywords that aren't actually relevant may cause a drop in rankings; so will hiding text by making it the same colour as the background.
Getting a good ranking is a great way to bring in traffic, but too many businesses plough time, effort and money into getting a high ranking without focusing on attracting visitors who are most likely to buy. Getting an increase in visitors through search engines is good, but are you also getting an increase in potential customers?
