It never hurts to refresh your understanding of way for website owners to increase the ranking of their website in search engines. When a user asks a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing to find something, the engine works to return the most relevant information it can find. By making sure the content on your page is ‘optimized’ for what most people are searching for will ensure that your website ranks higher in the results.
How do Search Engines Work
A search engine in a software program that searches for sites based on the words you, the user, select as search terms. The search engine uses ‘spiders’ which read through the content on a page; they scan the copy on the page, including page links, titles and tags. Spiders return to the sites regularly to check for updates or changes and everything the spiders learn goes into the search engine database. The search engine database uses a series of algorithms to determine page ranking, and this ranking goes up and down depending on the new information that the spiders bring in.
What can you do to increase your page ranking
If spiders are constantly cataloguing information which can change the ranking of pages then it is pretty clear that you need to be constantly working to increase your page rankings.
There are two ways to do this:
- First is getting links to your website from other sources. This is called ‘off-site optimization’. Acquiring links is important and search engines look at this as validation for the site being linked to. The more people linking to it are viewed as a better resource than a website that has few or no links.
- Second, and more importantly is ‘on-site optimization’ or, simply, putting up good current copy. Make sure you are constantly optimizing your titles, meta-tags and writing content that accurately describes what your page is about. A good website starts with good content, and this is what search engines want in order to return the results their users are looking for.
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