Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing

By Andrew Gowans

The following article is one of a series of articles, which focus on Affiliate, Article and Internet Marketing.

Search Engine Marketing - Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking

The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue.

The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That's what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.

The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage's title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less.

Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords - the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.

If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your Webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.

Many people believe that Meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it's worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use Meta tags in their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with Meta tags, you must access the code. If there are Meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a Meta tag would read: Meta name="keywords" content=.

Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.

If you type in "free link popularity check" in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.