Choosing your Keywords
The first thing you must do is decide exactly what word, words or phrase you want your site to be well ranked under. It can not be emphasised highly enough that selecting this search term is critical to getting maximum value out of your search engine listing.
Google have created a tool that helps you pick your keywords. Google Adwords lets you know how many people are searching using your keywords and how fierce the competition is for those terms.
The Optimisation Process
There are a couple of techniques you can employ within your pages to help you rank higher for your keywords – you can adjust most of these things on your website in Web Central.
Title Text
The title of a webpage (the text that appears in the blue bar across the top of the browser) is often the single most important factor in gaining a high ranking. The reason for this will be explained below in the “common mistakes” section.
Inter-site Linking
Many search engines are now ascribing a higher ranking to a page if it contains many links to other sites and/or is linked to by many other sites. Google is one search engine that uses such links as an important part of its ranking calculations.
URL Naming
Your domain name can play a major part in your ranking. All else being equal, a site at the domain woodenfurniture.com will rank more highly in a search for “wooden furniture” than will one at “xyz.com”.
Bolding and Font Size
Some search engines weight words within a page based on the font-size or other attributes used to enhance their visual appearance. ie: a page with a large heading that says “Wooden Furniture” will score more points than a page that only has the heading in small text or uses a heading that says “Our Stuff”
Keywords as Link Text
Just as emphasised text scores more points than regular text, so does link text. If you can use your chosen search term as a link somewhere then this will also contribute to a higher ranking.
There are many other factors and their importance depends very much on the individual search engine. You therefore may wish to spend some time examining the results produced by the search engines you’re planning to list on so as to get a good understanding of what is important and what isn’t. This information is critical to your success.
