Articles > Improving your search engine ranking
Introduction
A common complaint amongst businesses with websites is that the level of revenue and interest generated by their online presence is below expectation. Ensuring a reliable and independent revenue stream means more than simply getting your site ranking well on search engines for phrases involving your trading name.
Performing well under more generic search terms will ensure that your site is getting maximum exposure across the online marketplace. Consumers requiring your products and services are more likely to search for "mountain bikes" than "Jackson Cycles PLC", and in order to generate new interest your website should be promoting your business beyond your existing customer base.
This article describes how to revitalise your site's rankings by simply restructuring your existing pages and content. Whilst the information is fairly technical, businesses developing their own sites should be able to incorporate the main concepts fairly easily, and those employing designers can double check the steps being taken to ensure that their site is promoted correctly.
This article is aimed at sites with an existing search engine presence, and businesses new to search engine promotion may wish to start with the article Promoting your site to search engines.
Decide how you want to market your site
Before actually making changes to your website you must decide what search phrases you are aiming to target. As already stated your site will naturally rank well under your trading name as it will be incorporated within the site address, the page titles and the content. The aim of this exercise is to identify the wider search terms that your potential customers will be using to find businesses that can fulfil their needs.
Draw up a list of the words/phrases that you imagine your customers will use to find products or services like yours without including your company name. Depending on your business it may be wise to develop location-specific search terms, e.g. 'website design cheltenham'.
Look at your competitors
Use your list to perform some searches and see which of your competitors' appear at the top of the rankings. This should be you. Examine your competitorsÂ’ websites to identify other search phrases that you have not thought of. Look at the page titles, any bold headings in the page and any phrases that seem to be repeated often in their content. It may even be worth examining your competitor's source code (right click on the page and select "view source") to see what meta-tags they are using. Again, add as many to your list as possible.
Finally, use a tool such as www.wordtracker.com to add phrases and words that are most often searched for in your industry. Use wordtracker.com to prioritise your list, moving phrases that are more often searched to the top and relegating unpromising search terms to the bottom.
You now have a targeted, researched list of phrases that your customers will be using to try and find your products or services. If your business operates in a niche market where the common search terms may not be the most effective, then follow your judgement. Try raising a couple of your more unique search terms to the top of your list - they will provide the means with which to test your judgement call.
Make the changes
When assessing your site, search engines attribute different levels of importance to different parts of your website. The page title is given the highest importance when examining a page, with search engines figuring that the words in your title are going to be a succinct summary of what that page contains. The same theory is applied to header tags (< h1 > to < h6 >) on a sliding scale of importance. Furthermore, content closer to the top of the page is given more importance than that at the bottom of the page.
By combining all these factors the search engine can make a pretty good stab at what your pages are really about. In order to make use of this, you can ensure that your key phrases are repeated in all of these categories. For example, if a key phrase of yours is 'Web Design' you should endeavour to have a page on your site with a title beginning with 'Web Design', with headers and content containing the same phrase placed highly in the page. Different pages can be used to target individual phrases.
(Note, many search engines examine the density of such phrases or words within your content to establish the importance of them to the page; however, an exploration of this is beyond the scope of this article and it is left to the reader to discover more on this topic via the external sites listed).
Further to the actual content of the page, search engines such as Google will actually examine the URL of the current page. For the example above, a boost to ranking under 'Web Design' would be achieved by actually having a URL of www.xxx.co.uk/web_design.html.
Making the most of site links
Google in particular also examines the inbound and outbound links from a page. If your page links to lots of other sites which concern the same topic, or even more importantly lots of sites link to your pages, then Google will improve your ranking as a result. So the more links you can get (in both directions) the higher your ranking.
Internal links are also crucial, so ensuring that your pages are linked to relevant content in other areas of your site will also ensure better rankings. However, be careful not to overdo the number of links in your site as this may confuse your readers. A site map is an excellent way of adding extra (useful) internal links to your site.
When reworking your site you may find that you do not have enough pages to target all the keywords that you wish to. In this instance you have two choices: prioritise, or create extra pages that will allow you to target more phrases. Bear in mind that adding extra pages unnecessarily may make the site unwieldy to use and actually put off new customers. However, if the new pages are integrated properly and provide value to your readers then they will probably make your site more effective. One good way of extending your site is to add advice pages or more specific descriptions of your products/services.
Finally, once the reworked site is ready to launch try viewing your site in a text-only browser such as Lynx. This will allow you to see exactly what a search engine sees when it examines your site. Ensure that all your pages are easily accessible and that your key phrases are in the relevant places.
Sit back and relax?
Once the changes have been made sit back and wait. If your site is listed in Google you should start to notice your site moving in the rankings pretty quickly (Google scans pages on a fairly regular basis for topical content). However, it may be several weeks (up to 6-8 weeks) before the real rankings are reflected. Review your list of search phrases and see how your site is ranking, see which sites (if any) are ranking higher than you, use your new found knowledge to work out why, and then adjust the relevant page to see if you can beat them.
Also, keep an eye on your web traffic reports (if you have access to them) and watch for the phrases that are giving you the most traffic. Target these with slight variations in other pages to capitalise on this stream.
Search engine optimisation is a fluid science, but once your site has laid the foundations it does not take much time every couple of months to react to market changes, and the rewards for well-ranking sites are huge.
