One Search Engine Savvy Sista

Dedicating more of my time to researching Search Engine Optimization is enlightening and nerve wrecking because I’m figuring out to make my website ranking better, I’m understanding how I made my website ranking worse! First off, for those of you who love the design aspect of web development, don’t get blinded by the fun stuff! The growth of my website thus far has been completely backwards. I started off on the design, forced myself to enhance the content, and now finally I’m taking the time to evaluate the structure. Had I started my site the other way around my hit crowds would be infinitely greater than they are today. Before you get bit by the design bug, clearly develop your site’s foundation which should include – clear navigational links from your home page, content specific title tags on every page, and keyword dense content.

If your web development process has been as backwards as mine, here are a few tips to move up in the ranks.

1. Find out if you are indexed on Google and yahoo by doing a search for your site. If you are listed, be sure to click the link that says something like “More from this Site”, so you have see how many of your pages are indexed in each search engine.
2. Find out what your page rank is. Before you can improve your status, you need to know what it is.
3. Create a Google sitemaps account, create a sitemap, and submit it to Google. Sitemaps help Google find pages on your site that it might have missed, or can not access from your home page.
4. Your home page is the key to any WebCrawler’s door. It should content a good direct links to the additional pages on your site that you want search engines to see. If your homepage includes these links, you will have a better chance of these pages getting crawled by search engines.
5. I personal have read and can state from experience that a blog helps improve your visibility. Create a blog, blogger.com being a good service to use, and include direct links to pages on your site. Then submit your blog’s RSS Feed to Yahoo (http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request). Once Yahoo starts to crawl your feed it will find links to your site and also crawl those pages!
6. If there are any terms here than you can not understand, do a Google search and find out more information. The more you research SEO the better your chancing of increasing the number of pages you can get indexed.

Here are a few articles to look into:

Top Ten Search Engine Ranging Factors (posted on Search Engine Smarts)
1. Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Links
3. Keyword Use in Document Text
4. Accessibility of Document
5. Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages
6. Primary Subject Matter of Site
7. External Links to Linking Pages
8. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
9. Global Link Popularity of Site
10. Keyword Spamming (not doing it)

Also read: 21 Top Reasons Why Your Webpage May Not Be Indexed by Search Engines