Higher search engine rankings
Well I think we'd all like these simply because they will boost the traffic to our website. It's definately true if you get higher search engine rankings you'll definitely pick up more traffic. Although before you start rushing out and paying some SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) specialist who guarantees you page one in Google, Yahoo and MSN - just think about what the goal of your website is.
It's easy to guarantee higher search engine rankings because the phrase is fairly meaningless without one crucial piece of information - what will you rank higher for ? Search engines function on the user inputting a search phrase or keywords - these form the basis of their searches. This is what you are dreaming of - page one rankings for keywords. Now of course I can promise you page one rankings for anything but page one for 'mobile phone' is somewhat harder to achieve than ' hamster shaped mobile phone accessories" ! It's just a matter of competition and depending on your business those keywords will be different.
So those Higher Search Engine Rankings - how do I get them ? Well I'm not going to go into great detail here as this is an introduction. But all the search engines look at two main things when deciding who is page one for a search query and who is on page 143 - what's on the page and who is linking to that page.
Search Engines like Content
All Google and Yahoo are doing is trying to find the most useful pages for their users - they want to match the phrase or word typed in with the most useful pages. For your web page to rank higher up - you need to provide content that matches that query. If you have a page with one big picture and ten words of text - you'll never rank highly for anything.
Remember Google sends searchers to web pages - not web sites!
So the first thing you should remember is that your page should contain lots of content about that particular phrase or word. The phrase should appear in your title, it should appear a few times in your page (but not too many) and basically be the focus of the page. Extra points for appearing in a Heading or near the beginning in the page.
Web Pages Rank highly for Humans not machines
So logically you'd think a page that looked like this
"Mobile Phones
Mobile phones Mobile phones Mobile phones Mobile phones Mobile phones Mobile phones Mobile phones Mobile phones Mobile phones Mobile phones
etc"
.....would rank higher in the search engines for mobile phones ? Well a few years ago you'd be absolutely right but now it is exactly the opposite. That page is gibberish and of no use to any human searcher so all the search engines would completely ignore it. Even if you slightly overuse a phrase on purpose you'll likely to plummet down the lists - use the words on your page but they have to make sense and don't spam - you'll lose - the search engines are ruthless when they want to be.
A classic example of where people miss the point of search engines is with the Title - as far as search engine rankings are concerned the title is the most important section of the page. Logically a title explains what the page is about and so if your keywords appear in the Title you will appear much higher in the rankings for those words. You'll find many, many web pages which completely miss this chance - if you just put your company name in the title - "Hamsterfeld and Sons Official Web Site" - those words will be the highest ranking on that page. Of course you'll be in for a bonanza of visitors if millions of people type in 'Hamsterfeld and Sons' into google but I suspect this is unlikely to bring many more new customers.
So think carefully about the content on your page - especially that Title Tag don't waste it ! Make sure your page is focussed and delivers useful information on the subject your potential visitors want and will bring you those higher search engine rankings.
See some other information here - Improve Search Engine Rankings
Any comments or questions - see below - my name is Neil.
