Improving Your Search Engine Ranking

Improving Your Search Engine Ranking

Getting listed in search engines is not as difficult as you may think. With a little effort and some search engine tips, you may be surprised at just how much you can achieve. You have put hard work and many hours into making a great website. You need to do the same if you want everyone to be able to find the site.

In this article we will go over some basic, as well as some advanced tricks you can use to improve your sites listings on the search engines. These are proven methods that will work if followed properly.

Find out which search engines you should be concentrating on, how to get listed in those search engines, and possible reasons why you may not be succeeding in getting good listings.

We will discuss the importance and use of Meta Tags, and other good ways to have the search engines successfully spider, index and list your website.

Getting listed higher on search engines is not easy. Getting a high listing without Meta Tags is impossible.

Let's go over why they are so important to your site. When you submit your site to Google or many of the other search engines that use spiders to index sites, they only ask you for your URL. They then send a spider to crawl your website for all the other pages and details. The very first thing this spider looks for is Meta Tags.

If you do not have your Meta Tags in place, the spider will move to the text on your page, which can result in a crappy site description and no keywords. This would drastically decrease your ranking with this engine.

Here are the basic meta tags and what they do:

HTML:

<meta name="TITLE" content="What you want to appear at the top of browsers.">

HTML:

<meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="This is a description of your site. Use keywords here also, but keep the description under 1,000 characters.">

HTML:

<meta name="KEYWORDS" content="This is where you list all of the keywords for your site. Make sure there is a space between each keyword and DO NOT repeat keywords more than 5 times.">

HTML:

<meta name="OWNER" content="Put your email address here.">

HTML:

<meta name="AUTHOR" content="Put your name or company name here.">

HTML:

<meta http-equiv="EXPIRES" content="">

(Leave this blank to tell the spider not to remove your listing after x number of days.)

HTML:

<meta http-equiv="CONTENT-LANGUAGE" content="En">

(This tells the spider what language your website is written in.)

HTML:

<meta name="RATING" content="General">

(What the site should be rated as, Adult, PG, etc.)

HTML:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="index,follow">

(Tells the spider to follow all links on your site and list all found pages.)

HTML:

<meta name="REVISIT-AFTER" content="14 days">

(Tells the spider to re-index the website in 14 days.)

The 2 most important Meta Tags are keywords and description, these are the ones you should spend the most time and research effort on.

Keywords

This tag is the best of all Meta Tags. Keywords are very important, especially when submitting to the engines that use spiders or robots to crawl your site. Keywords can be a single word or short phrases. Go to a few different search engines and search for a website similar to your site using different keywords. Look at the top results of your searches and keep track of the sites that match yours the most.

Go to these sites. View their source and their keywords tag. This should give you a good idea of some of the keywords you should be using. DO NOT steal their meta tags. But use them to get your own ideas from. DO NOT repeat your keywords more than 5 times. Search Engines treat repetitive keywords as spam and can automatically reject your website and even block you from being listed. Always list your most relevant keywords first as thats where most traffic will come from.

Description

When you do a search and the results are returned, what do YOU look for?
Think of this when you write your description. You want to know what the website has and what the website can do for you. Nobody cares to see: This site rocks, visit it now!! Rather than a long tedious description, use a succinct two or three short sentences about your website.

In the two or three sentences, use highly relevant keywords! If you are not sure how to write your description, do a search for sites similar to your website. Find the top sites listed and view their meta tags! Find the ones that stand out. Use these as a starting point for yours. Do NOT copy them. But get ideas from them.

Sometimes, people submit their site to the search engines hundreds of times and still not get accepted or listed. Don't worry though. Just follow the directions that this book gives you and you will be on your way to a listing.

Why don't some sites get listed?

Generally bad HTML code. What is funny is, these people don't even know they have errors in their html. The newer version browsers are made to be flexible and can allow your page to load with or without code errors.

One big error people make on their sites are broken images. This make your site look unprofessional, plus it will slow down your load time and can even lower your ranking in search engines. I know, This is crap, because you would know if you had a broken image because you checked them all before, right? Let me ask you this. Do you link to other sites? Maybe an affiliate program that require you to pull their images from their remote server? Now you are thinking...

So does this mean you should not trade links? No, but you will be better off to store the images on your own site. That way it does not matter if their site is running when your site is spidered. The affiliates images are a bit harder to deal with, but we'll cover that also.

Bear in mind that when you submit your site to the search engines, that you are ranked by numerous things. Keywords, Title, Description, Loading Speed and Errors. The higher you rank, the higher your website will be listed in that search engine.

Keep your links alive. Dead links are a major flaw to search engines indexing your site. Dr. Watson, listed above can also check for dead links on your site.

The largest error! close all HTML tags. Opening tag - <HEAD> Closing tag - </HEAD>

I recommend validating your websites code before submitting it to the search engines.

 

Yes, rightly said, only keyword and description tags are much necessary...others dont help much(nil in my case.).... I think even digging or stumbling articles helps in getting quickly indexed by google...

 

Friends!,..
If you want to improve your Search Engine Ranking you must use vbulletin .We should not need to hack vBulletin to search engine optimise it, we should only have to work on the onpage words, but yes, php mods and template changes are needed for search engine optimizations of vBulletin forums.

Thanks

 

The tips you have mentioned above are all about On-Page Optimization.. It is one of the types of Search Engine Optimization which deals with the proper use of title tags, meta tags, alt-tags (this is use to describe images), keywords (you can use some of the tools for keywords), description and h1/h2 tags..

 

Agree with above comment. In SEO, on-page optimization refers to factors that have an effect on your Web site or Web page listing in natural search results. These factors are off-site in that they are not controlled by you or the coding on your page. Examples of off-page optimization include things such as link popularity and page rank.

 

Getting more and more backlinks from other websites will help you to get good rankings in search engines. Also, more than the number of backlinks you have for your website, the quality of backlinks makes more difference.

 

I think blog commenting and forum posting are another good ways of increasing the ranking of the website.

 

<meta name="REVISIT-AFTER" content="14 days">

One should use the tag if your site is not updating daily but getting weekly.

 

yes , I agree with alex1239.

 

Thank you so much for nice information.

 

Nice information thanks for sharing.

 

There is lot more in SEO other than meta tags. We just need to explore.

 

I think forum and blog posting way to improve your Search Engine Ranking.

 

Well, discussion over here is much interesting. It helps me for getting high rank on search engine.

 

hi,

Very nice but is there any other way to get more traffic in online via seo...??? meet again.

 

Nice Post.
Thanks for information.
It is very helpful for new SEO.

 

Does google or other serach engines consider meta tag?

 

Excellent thread but am not quite sure about the working of the meta data like re-visit.If it's working then indexing of own pages will be very easy for webmasters.