We get a lot of questions asking how to optimize websites to ensure that they show up high in search engine rankings. Obviously, the benefit is that if you rank high in the search engines they will drive a volume of new traffic to your website.
We do not recommend that you rely entirely on search engines to drive traffic to your website. However, it is a good idea to optimize your website for the best possible ranking. There are hundreds of factors that affect your ranking in the search engines. The search engine companies (Google, etc.) keep their ranking algorithms secret, so improving ranking is largely guesswork. Fortunately, through experimentation and observation some of the things that affect website ranking in search engines have been discovered. The following is a list of several of the major ones.
These things improve your ranking:
- Size of your website (the bigger, the better)
- Having content (i.e. text) on your website that is relevant to the search keywords
- Number of other legitimate sites linking to your website (the more the better)
- Age of your website (the older the better)
- Frequency of updates to the content of the website (the more frequent the better)
- Having the search keywords in your domain name
- Having the search keywords in the web addresses of the web pages
- Having the search keywords in the title of your web page (the title is what appears at the top of the web browser when you are on a particular page)
- Having the search keywords in headlines throughout your website
- Having properly written (i.e. standards-compliant) computer code
- Being listed in dmoz.org and dir.yahoo.com
These things penalize your ranking:
- Over-optimizing your website (too many keywords in text, etc.)
- Linking to other sites from your site — especially “bad” sites
If your website is lacking in any of the above elements that can improve your search engine ranking, please get in touch with your account manager. We can update your website to align with the above criteria so that you have the best possible chance of ranking high in the search engines.