How to get your website rank higher in search engines?

Add Meta Tags - Meta tags are information embedded in the HTML code. Include a carefully worded Title, Description, and Keyword meta tags to improve your result presentation. Meta tags improve your site's appearance in search result listings; however, alone do not magically place your site atop search results everywhere. Examine your competitors, or similar sites on the web. What keywords did they use? Where do they show up in a query using these keywords?

Attract Spiders - Search engines dispatch spiders to your site once you register with them. They find your content and make it available for searches by their engine's users. Not everyone uses the same engine to search the Web, so register your site with multiple search engines, Alexa, Alta Vista, AOL Netfind, Fast, Google, HotBot, Lycos, National Directory, Open Directory, WhatUseek, Yahoo. Keep your listing current and stay listed with the most popular sites at all times.

These days almost every engine or directory, no matter how big or small, offers some sort of paid option for websites to gain a presence. In some cases, paid options are the only ones that exist. The reality is that these fees are now part of doing business online. There is no guaranteed ranking with paid inclusion.

Optimize Your Content - To make your site more accessible to Web crawler:
- Avoid using frames.
- Express important points in text. Make sure your site offers substantial content.
- Place key content toward the top of each document.
- Don't make heavy use of images or other content that cannot be indexed.

Link Popularity - Link popularity is a measure of the quantity and quality of other
sites that are linked to yours. Sites that score high in link popularity enjoy a substantial advantage in terms of their search engine rankings, compared with sites that have lesser link popularity. Sometimes if you agree to link to other web sites, they'll do the same for you. This is called "cross-linking" or "reciprocal linking." More and more search engines rank your web pages based on the number of links that point to your web site.

Misc - Here are some misc measures you need to consider:

- Find easy and secure ways for your clients to pay you. A shopping cart and a secure way to accept checks and/or credit cards work very well.

- Place your business Web site address on all your printed literature -- business cards, brochures, newsletters, letterhead, e-mail signature, ads - everything!!

- Network locally to bring people to your site.

- Monitor your web site traffic with traffic analyzer usually offered by your hosting company.

Hire a Search Engine Optimization Expert - It may very well be worthwhile to hire an expert to handle your search engine submissions.

Ron (Shahram) Elli, Ph.D. is President & CEO of SOURCiS, a Technology Consultant Resource. Contact Ron Elli 530.575.0423 or .

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