Enterprise Nation

Follow these steps from our friends at The Good Web Guide and watch your site shoot up the search rankings. Every little helps when attracting new visitors and prospective customers.

1. Make sure your site is attractive, easy to use and read – some of them are evaluated by people rather than ‘webcrawlers’ (automatic page indexers).
2. Spend time thinking about the keywords and phrases to be used in your page title, headlines and the top of text pages, as well as those embedded in the meta tags in your HTML coding.
3. In particular, think laterally about the sorts of words likely to be searched for by the people who would benefit from your goods and services, and which will differentiate you from the competition.
4. Don’t over-submit your site – some search engines and directories will penalise you if you submit the site too often, without substantial changes to the content.
5. Make sure you understand how each search engines and directory works and what their submission criteria are.
6. Remember it can take up to three or four months for your site to be indexed or evaluated, although sometimes you can pay for this to be done faster.
7. Some search engines award higher rankings to sites that have lots of links to them, particularly if those sites are themselves high ranking. So work on persuading others to link to your site.
8. Examine the sites that get higher rankings than yours on competing keywords. Why is their site more successful?
9. Make sure your keywords are spelt correctly.
10. Add common variations of spellings and misspellings.
11. Monitor your rankings and change your keywords frequently.
12. Register for the Market Position Newsletter at: http://www.marketposition.com

• The Good Web Guide