Cracking the Ranking Game

A crawler based search engine searches literally thousands of pages and finds hundreds of matches to the search terms but only a few results are displayed on the first page or get a good ranking --- the reason is practical as well as informed SEO practices. So here are a few tips on cracking the ranking game.......

Keep away from spamming techniques: All major search engines penalize sites that try to "spam". Techniques "stacking" or "stuffing" words on a page can easily get you black listed or barred. In stacking process a word is repeated many times in a row with the color of the text to be the same as the background color of the page. Since search engines are smart, they compare the background color of the page to the text color and detect bulk keywords used to mislead end result your site is out.

Minimum Meta refresh: A number of search engines refuse to index a page with a high Meta refresh rate so try using it less often. Some site create target pages that automatically take visitors to different pages within a web site via the Meta refresh tag.

Target keywords: Keywords are the most crucial part for the ranking of a website and must be very carefully selected and arranged. Target keywords should always be at least two or more words long. Go for key phrases too because same keywords can be used in many different ways.

Keyword Position: Keyword positioning is placing your keywords and phrases in the title, description, heading and body text of the website. The title tag being the most, remember the titles should be relatively short and attractive.

More of text links: Search engines are lousy at following graphic button image links or image map links that most interactive sites use, so use graphic links but also place text links to the inner pages of your site at the bottom of your homepage as crawlers can find them and reach them.

Include Sitemap: Make a site map for your website and include that page in your search engine submission.

Avoid Frames: Frames links cannot be trailed by some of the major search engines so try replacing them with smart design or through Meta tags.

Evade Dynamic pages: Dynamic pages are mostly not visible to the search engines Try making static alternate page copies of the dynamic ones so that search engines can index them.

Steer clear of too many symbols: reduce the usage of symbols that appear in the URL's as search engines tend to malfunction when faced with such symbols.

Increase on link popularity: Link popularity can be defined as the number of "quality" links pointing to your website. Request more and more links from sites that are related to your subject and are placed high in the rankings by engines that will shoot up you ranking automatically. At Google if you have 20 to 30 quality links to your website, your page ranks above 5.

Key word density: "keyword density" should always be high on your pages. Keyword density can be defined as the number of times the targeted keywords or keywords used in your title tag appear in the body text of your pages, be it the heading text or plain text.

Shun bulk tiny text: Tiny text is the technique of placing text on a page in a small font size. Pages that are predominantly heavy in tiny text may be dismissed as spam. Or, the tiny text may not be indexed. Avoid using very tiny text in bulk on your pages.

Follow all the search engine rules: Some search engines like Google, Yahoo, Infoseek, Alta Vista, Hotbot ban web sites which break their rules. Don't indulge in insider techniques; they are the fastest way to get black listed.

Submit key pages: Submit pages that you think are the most vital in your website content wise and functionality wise.

Don't trust the submission process to automated programs and services: Some of them are excellent, but the major search engines are too important. Submit manually, so that you can see if there are any problems reported.

Sustain your listings: Once your pages are listed in a search engine, monitor you're listing every week. Sometimes Pages disappear, Links default. Regularly revisit Search engines.

Resubmit: Resubmit your site when you make important changes. Resubmitting after major changes will help ensure that your site's content is kept current.

Sahil Kumar is a web developer works with Web Development Company, having excellence in search engine optimization.