ib tutor,tutorial-The Why And How Of Getting High Search Engine Rankings

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The Why And How Of Getting High Search Engine Rankings By: Bryan Farrow

If you are reading this article then the likelyhood is that you will already realise the vast importance of having your website ranked highly on the search engines for your chosen (target) search terms or phrases, which are called keywords. Quite simply, being ranked at the top of the search engine results can transform your business. Once a high ranking is achieved, you may well dominate your market as you gather huge numbers of highly targeted visitors.

In a leaked study by AOL it was shown that some seventy percent of all website searches in the UK are conducted via Google Search. Further, some seventy percent of all searchers ignored the sponsored listings (the paid for advertisements) and clicked on the natural search results instead. Obviously, those listed at the top of natural (called organic) search results got the most clicks. Using the above figures, you can see how being ranked number one for a given search could easily get fifty percent of all UK internet searches for your chosen keywords. That's a huge amount of potential customers visiting your site day after day, month after month.

Quite simply, if you want to dominate your market, your website needs to be listed on the first page of the Google Search results for a number of keywords and search phrases. Otherwise, you are missing out on possibly the biggest and most receptive market for your products or services. Not being listed at the top of the search results means that nobody will ever find your website other than by typing in the address in the explorer bar.

Many of our clients have reported vast increases in the number of new customers once their website has hit the top spots, no matter how basic their website looks and no matter how little content their is. Your website only really needs to tell the potential customer enough to make them want to take action, whether it be to make an order online or to contact you by email or telephone. Your site content is of course important but nowhere near as important as getting a high rank.

So how do you achieve a high ranking on the search engines? Well this comes down really to three things. Coding, Content and Links.

Coding is how your site is structured. In non technical terms this means having your page titles site navigation well laid out so that search engines can easily and quickly index (search) your website.

Next on the list is content and you may have heard the expression content is king. Search engines like Google try to match up searches with results most likely to give the content that the searcher is looking for. Now this does not mean that the more content your site has the higher rank it will achieve. What it means is that the more 'relavant' content to searches that you have, the more likely that your site will rank higher. For example if your target market searches for 'search engine optimisation' then having articles and guides, videos and other content on your site, all on the subject of search engine optimisation (called S.E.O. for short) certainly won't hurt the chances of your site being found.

With so many websites competing for the top spots for any given keywords, it is surprising to say the least that many so called SEO companies still spend so much time on analysing and optimising content. After all, if there are so many competing sites all doing the same, surely this is just a lot of work for little potential return. In fact, many SEO companies in the know - and by SEO company I do not mean your everyday website design company - realise that on-site content optimisation and clean coding only counts for about ten per cent of the work necessary to get a high search ranking.

Consider two websites with extremely similar content. Which would Google list higher? Obviously there have got to be other ranking factors involved and by a long, long way the most important of these factors is called link popularity. Think of each link to your website as a vote of confidence. The more votes, the more important your site looks to the search engines, it really is that simple.

In other words, in the majority of cases the more one-way links that your website has to it from other websites, the better. Also bear in mind that not all links are equal. For example if your site content is all about SEO then you will gain more link 'juice' when you have a one-way link to your website from another website on an SEO related theme than say a website with content about cats. Further, the more important that website linking to you is, the more link juice you will get. To demonstrate this, a link from a famous such as Ebay will most likely give you a lot more link juice than say bob the plumbers' website in your home town.

So, once you have launched with website with clear coding, good relevant content and a call to action for visitors, you need links, links and more links.