Improve Your Search Engine Positioning

Discovering how to get a high search engine positioning can be essential if you have the slightest intention of succeeding with your web business

You can't ignore search engine optimization any longer.

More than 80% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN with Google the searchers clear favorite. If you don't have a high search engine positioning, your traffic will need to come from elsewhere.

Getting high search engine positioning is not an easy task. Anyone who tells you they can guarantee you a top positioning using SEO, at a price most people could afford is lying.

Just refer them to me, I'll gladly put their claim to the test.

Independent research by Oneupweb shows that 56% of traffic goes to those in the top 10 search results and 43% to Positions 11 to 30. Results outside the top 30 get the crumbs off the table.

Discovering the secrets to SEO can be both very technical and mathematical. After all SEO comes from trying to figure out what rules and mathematical formulas a vast array of computers called search engines are using.

But you can make some changes and maybe, just maybe, you'll see an improved positioning in the search results. But how much work you have to do depends on how much SEO your competitors have done and how much of a lead they have on you. The first item you can examine is the title on your pages.

Every page should have a <title> in the head code of the page
This can be up to 65 characters, including spaces. The length of titles is determined by number of characters, not words and each search engine (SE) has slightly different requirements.

Google and MSN allow 70 characters, Yahoo 115, and Ask/Teoma 65 chars. If you use more than this then if the SE uses this title for your search result listing it will get chopped short at the chars limit they set. So to be safe, stick to 65 characters or less.

Use the same title in your <title> tag as you do at the top of your visible page
You want the SE to choose a results listing that's interesting enough for a human visitor to want to click on it. The major SE's normally try to determine what words to use in a results listing from the <title> tag and actual title visible on the page (if any).

Use the same description in your <meta description> tag as you do at the top of your visible page. For the results description they look at the meta description tag and the first few sentences they find on the visible page (as they see it). Google allows up to 155 characters, Yahoo varies, but can be up to 400 chars, MSN 207 chars and Ask/Teoma 147 chars. So to avoid a chopped listing use 145 characters or less.

Even if you don't have a title on the visible page the search engine will make one up from what it can find on your page, it has to for the results listing. So you might as well point it at one you would rather have than let it choose it's own.

The search engine looks for a title in the first sentence on the visible page, so if you put something in bold using <b> tags or an h1 tag (better) that's what it will assume is the title of the page.

All you can do is give your pages proper titles (non visible in the head and visible on the page) and trust that the SE doesn't get confused and decide to give your results listing a garbage one.

You must use a key phrase in the visible and non-visible <head> page titles
You must also put your key phrase at the top of the page, in the middle of the page, at the bottom of the page, in link text in your navigation links, in your image alt tags etc.

Stuffing your keyword meta tag with as many words as you can think of is a waste of time. Putting key phrases in your keyword meta tag is only of value to the minor search engines the major SE's no longer rely upon them.

Search engines are only really interested in text on the visible page
They have no interest in your amazing graphics. For a search engine graphics can be an obstruction, they get in the way and make pages slower to load. If a page is too slow they will move on to the next page, which could mean slow pages never get indexed into the search engine's database.

You have to consider word proximity (technical stuff again)
A page where all the words in your key phrase are together, scores more points, than one where the words are spread out with other words in-between.

But don't over do it or it looks forced and unnatural and the SE's have penalties for pages they rate as over optimized compared to other competing pages.

You also have to consider word prominence
Search engines also look at word placement, that's how far into a sentence the key phrase appears. Is it at the beginning, middle or end of a sentence and this is known as word prominence.

How many words you have on a page is not critical to a search engine
Pages with very few words less than 20 can outrank pages with more than a 1000 words. So quantity is not important, but if the page is to have any value to your visitors think about how many words are needed for them.

Make sure the text on your page is POT - Plain Old Text and don't put text in graphics, search engines can't read it, unless that's what you intended.

Link popularity is very important to search engine positioning
Stick to getting links from sites related to your own. It's clear that sites with links totally unrelated and from sites with bad practices lost out in the Google "Jagger" update. They disappeared from the rankings in many cases and their page rank dropped. Google is determined to banish sites with no useful content and bad practices.

Make your site useful and full of good content
Eventually in time you'll find that other webmasters will want to link to you. Until then gaining a good Page Rank (PR) will be the only way some webmasters will link to you. That's because they're obsessed with linking to high PR sites and not low ones.

But you can out-smart them by linking to sites with high link value not PR. Read my report on Are You Hung-Up on Page Rank and Back Links to see why.

Tony Simpson
Making Your Website Work for You

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