How to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

What do you do when you want to buy something online? If you know of a review site or a price comparison site you probably go there. If you don't know of one the chances are that you'll use a search engine, probably Google. When the results come up you know that those in the right-hand column are paid for, so you'll probably click on those in the left-hand column, assuming that their high rankings mean they're high-quality companies.

A vast amount of sales are begun in this way. And that's why entrepreneurs like you are so keen on search engine optimization (SEO). This is about getting your site to appear high on those search engine rankings. It is fast becoming one of the most popular forms of marketing, and when you consider your own recent online purchases it is easy to see why.

While SEO can be extremely effective, it is also extremely complicated. Search engines use complex algorithms to rank websites, and SEO is essentially about understanding how these algorithms work and how to maximize a site's chances of scoring highly on them. There are now thousands of experts who will help you do this, but you can make a good start on your own by following these five steps.

1. Know what's hot
The first step is to find out what terms people are searching for online. There are several online tools that will allow you to do this for free, most notably Google's Insight for Search. It allows you to track certain words and phrases, to see when and where people are searching for them. Through these tools you'll be able to work out which keywords you should be using on your site. You'll find them at www.google.com/ insights/search

2. Give your website the right name
The most important words on your website are the domain name, so make sure your domain name both reflects what your business does and includes words that people are searching for frequently. Bear in mind, however, that for most search engine algorithms the age of a domain name is a positive factor, so it's always best to get your domain name right at the outset.

3. Use keywords, keywords, keywords
You can also alert the search engines to your website's relevance to a particular keyword by including that keyword in as many places as possible. Use it in file names and folders and in your page titles. Rather than getting visitors to click on images to navigate around your site, get them to click on keywords. Use these keywords in your text, but be careful not to overdo it. It's all well and good optimising your site so well that it attracts legions of visitors, but if all they find there is ungrammatical gibberish they'll soon leave.

4. Keep it fresh
The more often you update your content, the more frequently the search engines look at your site to see what is there. So build in time to make small, frequent changes to your site.

5. Get listed in a web directory
The search engines like sites that have incoming links. So, if you can have your site promoted on another site, you will boost your ranking.