We’ve received a number of calls and emails recently from people looking to boost their website’s search engine rankings. Web professionals call this search engine optimization or SEO. SEO is not a simple or quick fix. Be wary of anyone who tells you it is or “guarantees” results. Search engines closely guard (and frequently change) the algorithms that decide which sites end up at the top of their searches, as such, there is no magic bullet to get your site to the top of the list.
Despite not having a quick and easy way to shoot your site to the top of the search engines, a number of tried and true methods will boost your sites rankings with the big 3 (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN have over 90% of the market share). Here are some of the easier ones…
- Relevant Page Titles – The page title shows up on the top bar of your web browser window. It should say NDS Internet among other things right now. The title of a page is weighted heavily in the search engine algorithms and should be chosen accordingly.
- Links – Incoming, outgoing, and internal links are critical to your site’s rankings. Incoming links are other websites that link to your website. The more valid and relevant incoming links to your site, the more popular it is deemed by search engines and the better your rankings get. Outgoing links are links from your webpage to other websites and internal links are links from page to page within your website. The text used for outgoing and internal links along with the text surrounding it is typically weighted more heavily than the rest of the words on a page.
- Updated Content – Fresh content is good not only for SEO, but also for getting return visitors to your site. Both search engines and people will return to your site more often if they find new and interesting content on it. If the site is static, neither search engines or visitors will have a reason to return and your search engine rankings will drop. This is a great reason to build a blog into your site.
If you want to learn more about SEO, check out SEOmoz. Their Beginner’s Guide to SEO is an excellent starting point.
