-= Method Computer Technologies =-

Higher Search Rankings::

When people go to the web to look for information or products and services, they most often head to a search engine to begin their search. Each day search engines handle over 350 million search requests. If you have a web site, you know how important it is to be included in those search results—and the higher, the better.

But achieving high rankings in search engine results is not a cut-and-dried process. For one thing, most of the major search engines keep their ranking techniques a closely guarded secret to prevent spamming and to hide their methods from their competitors. Still, most experts agree that following a few basic procedures will greatly increase your site's ranking and overall visibility. We can break these procedures into two parts: site optimization techniques and promotion/marketing.

Part I: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In today's competitive climate, all sites that hope to be popular and generate traffic should be optimized for search engines and usability, which are often the same thing. To be most successful, SEO should be part of the design process from the very start.

1. Your Competition
The first step in SEO is to survey your competition, particularly those that are most successful on the Internet. Find out what works for them. To do this, pick a few keywords and phrases important to your field and search on them, preferably on a search engine on which you'd like to be ranked high. Since Goggle is currently the most popular and widely used, we suggest you begin your search there. The first ten sites that are listed are your primary competition—these are the sites that you're going to emulate and, hopefully, surpass.

Now take a look at each of these ten sites. Consider their design and features. Right click on the homepage and choose "View Source" to see what meta tags they employ—what are the keywords, descriptions and titles they use?

Next, go to Goggle and search on your competitor with this string: link:http://yourcompetitiorname.com. The results are a list of the sites that link to your competitor. These are the sites you want target later in the promotion and marketing stage. Being listed on these sites has helped your competitor achieve a high ranking, and it can do the same for you.

2. Keywords
Some SEO experts believe that keywords are falling out of favor with search engines and don't have the importance they once did. We choose to take the stance of "Better safe than sorry." It doesn't hurt to choose your keywords carefully. Successful keywords achieve a fine balance—they are popular enough to be frequently searched on, but not so general that 100,000 other site listings are also returned for that keyword. SEO tools such as Wordtracker can help you narrow down the possibilities and decide on the two or three keywords best for your site.

3. Meta Tags
Like keywords, meta tags can help in rankings—enough so that they are worth taking time over. But they are not foolproof. Write clear, concise meta descriptions that use your keywords but are also descriptively accurate. Nothing will kill your traffic faster than to fool visitors into thinking they're going to a site with certain information, only to find it isn't there.
Like meta descriptions, your Title tags are frequently displayed on the search results page. A page with a keyword in the title can rank higher than one without. Use Title tags to accurately describe the page's contents, while employing as many of your keywords as possible.

5. Spider Friendly Pages
Consider limiting the use of Java, Javascript, Flash and similar features. Search engines are unable to read these pages. If spiders can't access your site, read the content or follow the links, they'll have nothing to index.
Alt attributes on images should always be provided and carefully chosen, preferably with keywords if appropriate. This is especially important on linked images, which spiders place more importance on. Anchor tags should include a Title attribute, giving the spider even more direction and information about that link.

Finally, splash pages should probably not be used, except when absolutely necessary. Spiders weigh homepages heavier than other pages, and so the homepage should be as content and keyword rich as possible, not a meaningless jumble of spider-unreadable code.

4. Content & Headings
In the end the very best SEO tip for achieving high rankings is to provide terrific content and update it frequently. Content that is both relevant and fresh will find an audience, almost despite itself. People will link to it, and search engine spiders will follow those links to your site.

Including keywords sensibly in the headings and body text of the page will vastly increase that page's rankings. When spiders see keywords repeated in the page, they know the content is relevant. Again, though, we advise you not to falsely add keywords to a page that has nothing to do with them. Not only will users catch on quickly and never visit your site again, so will search engines.

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