Search engine rankings are the level at which websites appear in search results. This is an important consideration if you are trying to find your niche online and attract highly targeted traffic to your pages to buy from you. Having a prominent position in the search engines means a great deal more traffic will find you site and hence your products and services. One of the key reasons why people spend time trying to improve their sites in order to rank highly is because this traffic is essentially free. If you are just trying to build an online presence for your business, then it is possible to have an internet marketing consultant help you with this process of increasing your search engine rank.
What are search engine rankings?
Each website that is visited by a search engine bot is assessed on a range of factors that make up the bots logarithm. These things are then used to assess the purpose of the site, what it is about and how much authority it holds on the subject or topic that it covers. Once this process is done, the site is then indexed by the search engines and it can be part of the list of sites that is recalled and presented when a user carries out a search. Different words and phrases are the catalyst for sites to be listed when someone searches a set of words or phrases. If you have done a search and seen the enormous numbers of sites that can be listed, then you will understand that there are only a small number of these that are at the top of the list.
That is what search engine rankings are, the position of a site in that list of results on the search engine.
Are rankings important?
Most experts in internet marketing would agree that these search engine rankings are important. If you have a high ranking, then you will receive a much larger amount of traffic. If your site doesn’t rank highly, then chances are that you’ll receive very little of this free traffic. When you have a high ranking, you have a steady flow of free traffic that will reach you site, helping you to make more sales and increase your business profitability. If your site falls low in the rankings, you’ll miss out on this and it will mean that you need to pay out more money on other forms of traffic generation, such as PPC.
How rankings are measured
Search engine rankings are calculated based upon logarithms that are used by the search engines to index a site based upon the content of the site, its relevance and its ‘authority’. This means that the ranking of the site is done by establishing the content of the site and by looking at which sites link to that site. If you have a site that is well written and holds ‘pointers’ to the site contents, then you should find that it is fairly straightforward for the search engine to register your site and index it appropriately. These pointers can be things such as keywords or keyword phrases and their placement on the site, such as in headers and in site text. The other thing that is used to calculate the page topic and ranking are the sites that link to that site. If you have a link from a government site or an educational site, then this will help to boost your site ranking, as your site will be seen as a more authoritative site.
Tips for improving your search engine rankings
If you believe that your site is not doing as well in the search engine rankings as it could do, then you may want to consider taking some of the following steps –
1.Establish links with respected sites if this is possible (this must be done in an appropriate manner)
2.Make sure that you site content has keywords placed naturally and regularly throughout the text – just remember not to go overboard and stuff the phrases in
3.Check that your relevant keywords are in page titles and page descriptions where possible
4.Include description tags for any images included on your website
5.Look at establishing incoming and internal links that utilise your keyword phrases
Once you understand the importance of search engine rankings and you’ve established the steps you need to take to improve those rankings, then you are on track to improving your rank. With this improved rank, you’ll benefit from receiving more traffic and hence more potential customers to increase your business success and profitability.
