Schewanick Computer Services

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the latest trends in marketing. Websites have proven to be successful drivers of traffic and revenue. Naturally, companies are examining how to improve the number of quality leads to further drive profits on the web. Given the overwhelming amount of traffic that Google and Yahoo's search engines receive, the focus is often on improving rankings on these search engines.

Now, let us take a quick look at how you can improve your webpage's rankings. First, figure out what keywords your customers are likely to enter. Good keywords is a freeware program that can help you find words that are commonly searched for in your business. Once you have created a list, the next step is to optimize appropriate web pages to those keywords.

Find the pages that best fit the keywords. Don't force words in, simply look for ones that will potentially benefit those who search. Include the word or words in the title and meta description. While most search engines do not consider the meta key words, it is still probably worth entering. Search engines often look for the term in the title, meta description, and copy. If you overstuff key words into the copy, many search engines catch that and penalize you.

Your PageRank (by Google) is also considered. This basically examines the number of sites that link to you. Linking to link farms will not work, as they have no benefit, and will result in a penalty if you are linked to them. They often have a PageRank of zero. Linking to quality sites is the key. Partner and exchange links with reputable sites where both sides can benefit.

Finally, it may be worthwhile to consider bidding in pay per click programs such as Google Ad Words and Yahoo Search Engine Marketing. The sponsored words you see at the top and on the right side of search engines come from these programs. You can set maximum bids to stay on budget. This will at least put you on the radar while you wait for your site's rank to improve. Yahoo (of course) claims that both being ranked highly and having the ad word has a significant impact on the campaign's effectiveness.

There are other small items. One example is a new page takes about nine months to be ranked well within Google. Essentially, seniority is a benefit in their algorithm. On the whole, the aforementioned items are most critical for trying to boost the number of hits from search engines. It is a powerful and cost effective technique, one that certainly warrants some effort.

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About the Author
Brett Daly is a Marketing Specialist for a software firm in the mailing and printing industries. He has a MBA and a B.S. in marketing with a minor in political science from the Rochester Institute of Technology.