The Whole Truth About Search Engines
A Pet Sitter's Guide to Google, Yahoo and DMOZ

Part 7: Take Action

Here's a list of potential factors in ranking websites and web pages:

1. frequency of keywords within a page and website
2. location of keywords within a page and website
3. context of keywords within a page and website (words used in combination on a page or site)
4. keywords within the domain name
5. keywords within filenames and directory names of a website
6. the quantity and quality of internal links within your site
7. the quantity and quality of external links in your site
8. the quantity and quality of external sites that link to your site
9. the popularity of your site (number of hits)
10. the quantity of hits your site receives from search engine results
11. the uniqueness of content in your site
12. the volume of content in your site
13. the length of time your domain name and website have been up and running (older is better)
14. domain name class (.edu does better than .org, .org does better than .com...)
15. age of individual pages (newer is better)

So how can you use all this knowledge to your advantage? First seek out friends and associates with websites and ask them to link to you, or offer to exchange links. If their site is related to yours in theme or content--all the better.

Next, approach some of your favorite sites (again, related to your own subject matter is best), and ask them to link to you. You may save yourself some trouble and first check their site to see if they look like they are open to link requests.

Use Google and Yahoo to search for your chosen keywords. Visit the sites that are ranked higher than yours, and ask them to link to you as well. If they are open to it, they may unwittingly pull your ranking up.

Here is something really sneaky, but very effective. In Google, you can see a list of all the sites that link to your site be typing the prefix "link: " before the domain name. An example: "link: www.google.com" will give you a list of all the sites that link to Google, in order of importance. Now do a search on who links to your competitors--the ones who are ranked higher than you. Visit each on of those sites and ask if they would consider linking to your site as well. You may find yourself moving up the ranks quickly.

The key to imporving your status in Google is to raise your page ranking. One of the ways to do that is to get other sites with high page ranking to link to yours. The best way to see how your site and others rank in Google is to use the popular FireFox web browser, which is integrated with Google's toolbar. The toolbar has a page rank guage built right in. It also has a lot of great tools that makes searching easier and more convenient. It's a geat tool to use when you are optimizing your site. Click the link below to try FireFox with Google Toolbar for free.

A note on paid (sponsored listings) in search engines. You can not pay to be ranked higher in conventional search results on either Yahoo or Google. However, both search engines do have paid advertising programs that allow you to bid on placement of text and graphical advertisements. Your Ads can appear in a variety of places, including search results pages or private websites.

It is important to remember that the web is always changing. You change your site, your competitors change their sites, and perhaps more importantly, Google and Yahoo tweak theirs. It is common to move up and down the list often for unknown reasons. If you see your site make an unexpected slip, don't panic. Wait a few days or even a couple weeks. It might come back up. Unless you find a glaring, definite problem in your site, make SEO changes slowly and deliberately, and have patience.

Recommended steps:

1. Decide which keywords are most important.
2. Select a domain name that contains your most important keyword(s). This might be difficult if your business name doesn't contain any important keywords. Also choose file and folder names within your site that contain keywords as much as possible.
3. Write or rewrite your text copy to make use of your selected keywords as much as is appropriate.
4. Use keywords as much as possible in various HTML tags as listed in Figure 1.
5. For good measure, submit your site to Google, Yahoo and DMOZ.
6. Ask your friends and associates to link to your site.
7. Seek out other sites, with discretion, to exchange links with.
8. Consider using paid/sponsored ads and Google or Yahoo.

Would you like some help with your site? Contact Worlds by Design for a free consultation on how they can help you increase your search engine page ranking potential.