How To Increase Your Search Engine Rankings

Search engine optimization can seem like rocket science sometimes. Some would have you believe that optimizing your website is a long expensive complicated process. That is not really the case. There are some very simple basic techniques you can use to optimize your website to increase it?s search engine ranking.

Why do you even need to optimized your website? A high search engine ranking for your website is so important that if you intend to succeed with an online business you simply cannot avoid this issue. Statistics show that 80% of people looking for products or services online use search engines like to Msn, Google and Yahoo find what they are looking for. The reason for optimizing your website is to attract highly targeted visitors to you site, visitors who are more likely to make a purchase. The higher your web pages come up in the search results the more traffic your site will receive.

There are thousands of optimization websites available online, you could dive in head first into this techno jungle and most likely you will probably never be heard from again. Or you could make some small adjustments to your website that will soon improve your ranking.

*Take a look at your home page, look for a colored bar at the top of the page, this is the title bar. The words that appear in the title bar should be your most important key words. These words help to improve your ranking.

*Next click on all of your links and check the title bar of all of your pages. Be sure they include all of your relevant keywords. Do not overload your title bar with a long string of keywords; keep it to about four or six. Do not repeat keywords in your title bar and be sure to separate identical words.

*Search engines are impressed with quality more than quantity. Do not have your web pages covered in fancy graphics. Search engines will see your site as having little use to its searchers, instead look to fill your pages with quality content, useful information that the search engines can use. The text on your site should contain a light smattering of your keywords; these are the words that the search engines are going to look for when sending results to their searchers.

*The text on your web pages must be written in HTML (hyper text markup language) so that the search engines can read your text. Be sure to check and find out if your text is in HTML format, if not ask your Webmaster to change it for you.

*Many folks believe that meta tags are the key to search engine optimization. The truth is that they only have a small effect. It is however still worth having them as every little bit helps. To find out if your page has meta tags click the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select "source." This will bring up a window showing the code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. A meta tag would read: meta name="keywords" content=. If you cannot see any code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. Just remember that this will probably not do much for your search engine rankings.

*Linking is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked too and who have linked to you. If you want to check your link popularity go to a popular search engine and type in link:www.mywebsite.com (replace yourwebsite.com with your website domain name) If you find that you do not have any incoming links to your website you must consider beginning a good linking campaign. This would involve contacting webmasters with good quality websites to exchange links with you. It is a slow process but it is most definitely worth the effort. Linking to high quality sites increases your rankings and traffic dramatically.

If you decide to ignore all of the marketing tips in this article please do not underestimate the power of linking. Remember the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way, and that means more money in your pocket.

Carol King-The Home Biz Lady is a part time Internet marketer, who is dedicated to helping others and providing the best information on Internet marketing. Take a look at Carol King's Home Business Know How Blog at http://www.HomeBiz-KnowHow.Blogspot.com