As a beginner you probably get sick and tired of people telling you the importance of getting good search engine rankings. When you are first starting your online business and get your website up and running, quite often people tend to try and avoid this issue, because it can become confusing, especially for a beginner. It gets put in the too hard basket. You need to realise that getting your website to have a high search engine ranking is so important these days. It is an essential step of building your online business. Think about when you are doing a search for a topic on google for example. Do you search through 20 pages of results or do you only look at the first 2-3 pages then change your search to something else?

Search engine optimization is all about optimizing your web sites pages to get high search engine rankings. This is undertaken to attract targeted visitors to your site. Getting your page to come up higher in search engine results will result in more traffic getting directed to your website, which means more potential customers.

Now for a beginner this can become very scary and frightening, but if you start by looking at simple items on your pages and making minor changes you will probably start to notice some improved rankings.

Here are a few things simple things that you can start putting into place to help you begin this scary task of getting higher search engine rankings. Follow these steps and you’ll be on your way.

The first detail you should start with is the title bar situated on your web sites homepage. The title bar is the coloured bar which is situated at the top of the page. Take note of the words that come up on the title bar when you go into your websites homepage. What has this got to do with search engine rankings? The words that are set for your homepage’s title bar need to include your websites most important keywords or phrases. It is also recommended to include your company name in the title. This is an important aspect of optimizing your website as this tells the search engines your homepage’s details – who it is & what it does. It’s like having your business listed in the Yellow Pages. You list who your business is and what you do.

Now we need to click on all the links and your website and then analyse the title bars on each of the pages on your website as you go into each one. Every title bar on each of your websites pages should incorporate the most significant and important keywords and phrases which are taken from the content on that particular page. You should avoid having lengthy strings of keywords and keep them to no more than six or less words. In each title bar you should not repeat a keyword more than once. Also check that any identical words are not sitting next to each other.

The next step is to work on the content of your website. The text contained on your site needs to incorporate your most important keywords. Keywords are the words that your potential customers will be searching for when using search engines to try and find your site. Content, which is the text on your site, is more important than having lots of sparkling graphics as search engines will in general list sites that contain good quality content than sites that are just full of pictures. If you’re not sure how much text you should have on your websites pages, you should be aiming for around 250 words on every page. If you are unable to reach this amount then no less than 100 words, but if your content is made up of less words make sure you carefully chose the words you use.

It is important that you’re content is made up of text and not just graphics. Make sure you’re text is not in graphical format and in HTML, this is important as search engines need to be able to read your text. They can’t read your site’s content if your text is a picture. The easiest way to find out if your text is in HTML format is to try and highlight a couple of words with your mouse cursor. If you can successfully highlight these words then your text is in HTML format. If it is the other way around and you are unable to highlight the text, then there is a strong chance it is in graphical form. You will need to have the text changed into HTML format to give your site a chance at increasing it’s search engine rankings.

The next step we need to look at is meta tags. Now this step isn’t that scary. It is simple once you know what it means. Meta tags are believed to be the main key in getting high search engine rankings. They really only have a little effect on this bit at the same time it is still an important step to take in search engine optimization just in case a search engine decides to equate meta tags into their search engine ranking formulas.

You need to find out if your web sites page is already set up with meta tags. To do this you need to access the source code of the web page. Don’t be scared this isn’t hard to do. Simply click on the “view” button situated on your web browsers menu bar. Then select “source”. You will now see a window with some code in it. This is the code that has been generated when the page was created. Now if there are meta tags in the code, they are usually situated towards the top of the window. You need to be looking for a bit of code that reads like this – meta name=”keywords” content= . If your site does not have any meta tags you will need to arrange to have this done.

Now we need to look at the topic of link popularity. Now nearly all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. What is link popularity? Some kind of popularity contest? Well not quite. Link popularity is established on the quality of the sites which you have linked to from your links page. This is a very important factor in the task of getting good search engine rankings.

We’ll do a short exercise to show you how this works. Go into a search engine of your choice. Type in “free link popularity check” and the search engine will then show you any sites that are linked to yours. If there aren’t any or a lot of sites that are linked to yours or the sites that are linked have themselves low search engine rankings, you should think about running a link popularity challenge. This involves getting in touch with other quality web sites and asking if they would exchange links with your website. If you are going to do this I recommend taking a look at the rankings that those websites have. Again you want to link to good quality sites as this will help to improve your search engine ranking. It will also direct more good quality traffic to your site.

If you are serious about having an online business that is successful then you will need to look at optimizing your website to get high search engine rankings. This is such an all important role of getting quality traffic to your website. By taking these few simple steps you should see an improvement and in return gain more quality customers directed to your website. If you’re still not getting results then you should contact your webmaster to help you further with this task.

About the Author

Kellie Simon is a Full Time Internet Marketer, who also provides support to Online Business. Kellie loves sharing her knowledge to encourage and assist others to get started in their online business. Visit Kellie’s Blog to get her free report revealing the top 9 methods you can use to get started online and making money today. Go To Kellie’s Blog – http://www.kelliesimon.com.au

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