Free Surf 72

ranking on search engines.

Every webmaster can register his website to search engines. Everybody knows that if your website does not come up on the search engines on one of the top three pages, it is as if it does not exist. So, what are the parameters that set the website ranking and improve its' chances of becoming the number one on the search list? A successful job can lead to great marketing results.

This article will focus on how to get a higher ranking on search engines. Its' importance derives from the frequent use of search engines. Therefore, every web developer tries to study the parameters that lead to better ranking.

In this article we will go over some important parameters that are related to keywords and ways to improve them on your website. Obviously there are more parameters, but in this article we will only deal with some.

Before we start I want to stress the importance of this subject, by using a personal example of a website we run, and by doing so - encourage you to keep reading the article. Of course I cannot reveal the identity of the website owner, but do trust me, that this a true story.

Well, a customer came to me with a very beautiful website based on Flash technology. It had animation, background music, colors, buttons, etc. It was much like the well-invested computer games. But, the website was built over two years ago and a lot has changed in this business, so the contents of the website had to be updated as well. The problem was that the customer had difficulties investing more money in this website, since he never made a single transaction via the website, and therefore he didn't believe marketing over the internet is effective (I hear that claim very often). After running his website's server's statistics, it turned out that he actually had an average of two entries a day, since it was built.

Eventually the customer decided to give it another shot, and let us rebuild his website. The website was built using a data administration system with merely a 10 hours per months work's budget (on a regular basis). In this website, we took under consideration all the parameters that are mentioned on this article. Since the deal was also based on commissions, we monitored and saved all the records and here are the results.

Time (in Months) Entries (per day) Calls Transactions (per month)
1 8 None None
2 17 1 None
3 16 None None
4 20 2 None
5 54 5 2
6 94 7 3
7 190 21 2
8 210 19 12
9 225 23 9
10 239 21 15

After the 10th Month, the average entries number was reduced and remained stable on about 200 entries a day. On the other hand, the average transactions number was increased and now stands on 16. Just to remind you, before our work of promotion, the website had had an average of 2 entries a day and no transactions whatsoever.

The number of entries is relative to the type of the website, type of business, type of products and type of services. For one website, these statistics may not look very "hot", whereas for another - they would look incredible.

Well, after I impressed you (I hope) lets start.
first, lets go over the properties of a search engine, how the robot or the search engine's "crawler" works, we will see the difference between a search engine and an index, and then move to how to improve your website's ranking.

How does a search engine work?
Everyone knows that in order to be part of the search engines' database, you have to register your website, fill out the wanted details and send. Well, let me surprise you- it's not required in order to be included in the big search engines' database. It is because the search engines feed their database using a "crawler" (robot) that surfs over the Internet, scanning all the websites it finds on the way. Therefore, even if you do not register your website directly to a "Register a Website" form on a search engine, the site will be found as it is, in condition that other websites are connected to it. That's exactly the thing that differentiates a search engine from an Index. A search engine feeds data automatically, using a "Crawler", whereas an Index is catalogued by people who visit the site and rank it according to what they think of it. Therefore, it is very important to register the website to an Index.

The problem is not only becoming a part of a search engine's database - but on which location, or page number on the results page, does the website appear when searching for a relevant keyword? if my website is ranked number 18,500 on the results page, then it is as if it does not exist. Researches show that only the first three results pages matter to the user, which means 30-45 first results on the list. That's why the website's ranking is so important.

Back-Links:
That is one of the most important parameters for ranking. We will go over it in short since you can read about it on a different article I wrote, dedicated to "Back-Links". Well, Back links are the number of links on other websites or web pages that are linked to your website. In the scanning process of the "Crawler" robot, he counts the number of websites or web pages linked to your website, and the more links there are, the more popular your website is. There are two types of links: Internal link and External link.

Internal Link:
These are the links inside the website itself, meaning - between the pages of the website. Therefore you will find, on many "heavy" websites, a button that is called Website Map which contains links to all the parts of the website. It is important to link as many pages as possible to other pages and link them to the main page, and vise versa. Some even link words inside the texts to different pages. For example: Look at the following text block.

Here is an example of how it works. The purpose of this paragraph is to demonstrate the internal link method inside this website. It consists of words that use as links to other pages on the website. Obviously, they must have some logical connection to the page to which they link to. For example, the words "Main Page" should be linked to the main page, etc.

External Link:
These are the links to your website, that are on other websites. In order to achieve a situation where other websites are linked to your website, several actions must take place, like - initiating a cooperation with other web masters, participating actively in Forums and discussion groups. You can read more about it on the article about "Back-Links". The ranking of the websites that are linked to you is significant. That is why you do not want to initiate cooperation relationships with poorly-ranked websites. Make sure the site you wish to cooperate with is ranked 3rd degree and above. You can check the ranking of a website using the following tool "Link Popularity Check" on Google.

How can I find out which website are linked to mine?
Aahhh.. That's simple. Go into "Google" or "Yahoo!" and enter the following question on the search field: Link:www.yoursite.com when you yoursite with the name of your website, and then you receive a list of websites and web pages that are linked to your website. By the way, using this method you can learn which websites are linked to your competitors.

Meta Tags and Keywords:
Meta Tags are a number of tags that give information to the search engine's crawlers. There are different types of Meta Tags but the most important ones are the "title" tag, "description" tag and "keywords" tags. These tags are located at the top of the HTML page, between the Head tags and it looks like that:



Today a large number of the search engines are not using the Meta Tag scanning method; instead they analyze the content of the website. Even though, the Meta Tags are important on a website. Okay, now you know what meta tags are. There are a few more parameters I want to make sure that you understand before we proceed.

Title: That is the page's title as it is displayed on the upper border of the Internet browser. The "Title tag" looks like that:


Title Content: That is an HTML tag that characterizes titles inside the contents by sizes, and it looks like this:

welcome to the website

That's all... Now we are really clever and we can proceed.
Find out what are the best searching keywords for your website (How do you do it? That's a topic for a whole article). Choose 3-5 of the most important and popular keywords. Combine these words inside all the elements we introduced here. That means,

32 On the title page.
32 On the Description Meta tag.
32 On the Title Meta tag.
32 At least on one Title Content
32 and of course inside the contents' text of the webpage itself.

For example: Lets say that we are talking about a flower-shop website, and the important keywords I characterized are: Flowers, Plants, Roses. Then, the HTML script would look like this.




Insert keywords in image meta tags:
You can improve your chances to succeed by adding keywords inside the image meta tags. For example:

src="flower.gif" alt=Flowers and Plants" width="134" height="97">

Some even take it further and name the files, folders and pictures with names that include the keywords. For example:

flowers-garland -plant.jpg

In conclusion:
There are many ways to improve the parameters that set the ranking of the website on search engines. In this article we simply went over a few parameters that involve keywords and back-links. In order to succeed in ranking a website high, it takes a constant investment in these methods, finding out what are the best keywords, and checking the result pages on search engines. These results and the keywords are dynamic, changing and never last for long. But before you set off, I want to warn you about all the scamming methods and spam emails. Do not be tempted to participate in links exchange programs, do not try to manipulate the search engines by creating false web pages and links, do not fill you website with keywords that repeat themselves over and over, just to get a higher ranking. And in short, use your common sense and I am sure that you will succeed in raising the number of entries to your website substantially. It might take some time, so do not expect immediate results. That's it.