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The internet continues to grow at an almost exponential rate with new sites and
pages being added and registered with search engines every second of every day. Search engines are the main route through which new customers
will find your site (80% of internet users use search engines to find the
information they are interested in).
If your site is not found when a search is done for the
services and products you provide, the investment you have already made in
creating your site is being wasted. And unless your promoted pages appear in
the top 20, preferably top 10 results, your site
will not be visited by a large proportion of potential
customers.
However, there are some things you can do yourself to improve your site's
ranking.
Inbound links
Many search engines evaluate the number and quality
of inbound and outbound links in determining a site's
rank or importance. Outbound links need to be added
by your webmaster, but you can add to the number
of inbound links to your site. Follow the procedure
below:
1. Identify key phrases or search terms appropriate
to your site.
2. Enter the search terms into Google.
3. For the top 10 or so sites returned, open
a fresh Google window and type link: followed
by the domain name (eg link:www.basic-sites.co.uk)
where you would normally type the search term. The
sites returned all list your competitor's
site, helping to boost its ranking.
4. Identify any sites returned that you feel
are appropriate and email the webmaster asking for
your site to be listed. It's especially useful to
approach 'directory' sites as they will not request
a 'reciprocal' link.
5. Contact your webmaster for any sites that
request reciprocal links as these will need to be
added to your own site.
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Ranking
'must haves'...
Meta
tag optimisation
Optimising
the content and the meta tags of your main site
pages will make the most of each page's visibility
and will increase the likelihood of people finding
your website. This is particularly important for
the title and description tags as these are the
tags searchers will see when results are returned.
Good
content
Your
site needs good content, and focused information
pages created with keyword/phrase-rich
content. Focusing on individual product ranges or
services provids themed and relevant information.
Directory
submission
Directories
such as Yahoo, Open Directory, Looksmart, and others
use different techniques and do not use spiders
or robots to index your site. These are directory-based engines which normally require only a single
submission, a single time and often use humans to
monitor submissions.
Inbound
and outbound links
Many
search engines boost the ranking of any site that
has links to and from other relevant sites with
good rankings, as these are considered more important
or relevant.
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