High Rankings in Search Engines

How to get High Rankings for your Website in Search Engines.  The 30,000ft view!

by Trey Collier
www.CommerceFriends.com
November 9th, 2003

Why would you want to have high rankings in the Search Engines?

To increase your website's traffic, it must be ranked within the top 20-30 positions in the results of the major search engines.  You also have to make sure that your site retains its search engine position over a long time period to maximize their effectiveness.   I've provided a brief overview, a 30,000ft view, of what is entailed to obtain high rankings in search engines.

The number of web pages on the web is in the billions, how do you achieve the top spots among all those competitors?  A simple web site submission alone is not enough!  Many website submission services offer to submit your site to hundreds, even thousands of engines on the web.  Simply submitting your site alone does not guarantee any top rankings or that you’ll receive any new web site visitors.  There is even no guarantee that the search engines will even index your website.  If people cannot find your web site on the first two or three pages of the search engine results, then your web site might be compared a poster in your hand that you are waving to prospective buyers that are in a jet passing overhead.   You will be just wasting your time, energy and resources!   When was the last time you went to page 10 of a search results to find a product or service? 

The fact is, few people are willing to click on search engine listings that are deeper than the second or third page of results.  To be successful, your site has to be ranked in the top two pages for your most relevant keywords or phrases.

Want to know the basics of how to get ranked in the search engines?   Take a look at Search Engine Optimization from an airplane's view,  30,000ft in the air!

Getting ranked high in the Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs, is acquired tediously by many combinations of techniques.   These search engine optimization techniques can be boiled down to basically the following: 

1. Optimizing a page of your website for the Keywords and/or Keyword Phrases for which you want to attain the high rankings.   ("On Page" Optimization)
2. Creating good keyword/phrase content on other pages within your website and making a link to your optimized page with the same keywords/phrases in the text part of the anchor link.   ("Off Page" Internal Links)
3. Acquiring links to your optimized page, also with the same keywords/phrases in the text part of the anchor link, from other pages of other websites, hopefully pages that are already indexed in the search engines that you want to index your site.  ("Off Page" External Links)
4. Making sure you have more internal links and external links to your optimized page than that of your competitors.
5. Wait for the search engines to crawl (or index) your optimized page(s) from other pages that link to it. 

EXAMPLE:  If you want to be ranked high for "Blue Widgets", then ....

1. Create a page that has been optimized for "Blue Widgets". 
2. Create good content pages that are about, or in the same or similar subject as "Widgets" and link to your "Blue Widgets" with the words "Blue Widgets" in the link itself.
3. Get other websites, preferably similar websites of similar subjects of "Widgets" to give you a link to your page about "Blue Widgets" with the words "Blue Widgets" in the link.  Make sure that their page is already indexed by the search engines.
4. If your competitor has 65 internal links and 20 external links to his page about "Blue Widgets", then you need to create more internal links and/or obtain more external links than your competitors total links, to achieve a higher rank in the SERP's than their page.
5. Wait until the Search Engine spiders have crawled your page and added your page to the index.   This usually will take less than 30 days.   It may take up to 3 months.   Submitting to the major search engines is no longer the preferred way to get indexed as most of the major search engines crawl the web regularly.   If you followed #3 above, the spiders will come.

Yes, I know, this sounds way too simple!   But in a quick nut shell, this is the 30,000ft view of how to get ranked high in the search engines. 

There are literally hundreds of other small and large details that you must also consider, but that is for another article.

Next article:  How to optimize your page for Search Engines - On Page Considerations.

Trey Collier has been a professional in the computer industry since 1983, and on the Internet & eCommerce since 1993.   He is a skilled programmer, database designer, data research analyst and technical consultant.   He has worked with companies like Harrah's Entertainment, Smith & Nephew,  Promus Hotel Corporation (now Hilton), First Tennessee Bank,  Bank of America and many more.  He currently is providing search engine optimization consulting & SEO services.
He can be reached at tcollier@commercefriends.com.