How to get a good ranking on search engines

There are literally thousands of search engines available on the Internet. Some of them concentrate on searching for information from a particular country, others from a certain sector. But getting a high ranking in the leading worldwide search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN should be the priority when trying to increase traffic to your site.


There are two types of search engine - pure search engines and directories. Having an understanding how they work and how to submit your site is key to getting a good ranking.


Pure search engines, such as Google, rely on user submissions and ‘spiders’ to find new websites, whereas directories, such as Yahoo!, require you to submit your website for inclusion. See this useful article which explains the two types of search engine in greater detail.


It’s a good idea to become familiar with how these search engines work and how to submit your site to them. Most provide information on getting a listing and provide information that can help increase your ranking. See Google, Yahoo! and MSN for their tips and suggestions.


Here are some other tips and tricks you can employ to get your website a higher place in the search engine rankings:

Populate your site with relevant keywords. The more carefully you populate your site with these keywords, the more opportunities there will be for search engine spiders to find it. You can check your level of keywording against other sites with this free tool.

Work on your link popularity. The more websites that link to yours, the higher your site will appear in search results. Try contacting non-competing, related businesses and persuade them to put a link to you on their site.

Don’t neglect your metadata. This is information that the search engines can see, but visitors to your pages can’t. It includes descriptions of what’s on the page, keywords and image captions. Experts are divided on how useful the information is to search engine rankings, but this useful guide provides a good overview.

Don’t try to fool the search engines - it may backfire. Overloading your website with popular keywords that aren’t actually relevant may cause a drop in rankings; so will hiding text by making it the same colour as the background. Most search engines provide a guide to what they will and won’t accept.

This guide provides further tips on gaining a higher ranking. But, in short, search engine rankings are certainly important, but you must follow basic business and marketing principles to ensure that your ranking will also result in your main target audience landing on your site.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR: This small business news article has been written by Cobweb Information Ltd, the UK's leading publisher of information for small businesses and their advisers. To get more regular, fresh, practical information and news about starting up and running a small business, go to www.enterprisequest.com.