by Brenna Mae

Created on: September 02, 2007

Everybody knows it: The better your webpage ranking is on all those search engines out there, the more visitors come to your website. Many search engines are hard to figure out though. You can have a website that has it all: user friendly, fun, useful, full of content, and not such bad web design either. -but the ranking is still not up there.

Well here's the obvious number one step-submit your site to the search engines. You don't automatically have your spot in any search engine if you don't submit it. Submit to bigger ones especially like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alexa, ect. You can use other services that will submit you to tons of smaller ones at no cost. It may take a few days to get your site reviewed to be on the search engine, but in time it will make it-somewhere in that clutter of websites.

Now to improve your rank. The ultimate rank-the rank everyone desires the most-is the #1 spot on Google, so let's strive for that goal. How do you get up there? Here's how it works: Google (and other search engines) look at your meta tags to see if they're relevant to your actual site content. An old trick is to use popular phrases in your meta tags, so when the majority of the population searches for these things, they'll see your site pop up. Don't do this! First of all, Google will not index you if your site is irrelevant to your meta tags. Second of all, when users are searching for a specific topic, and they come to your website and don't find it, they'll surely just leave right away. Have specific, relevant meta tags, so search engines can index your website appropriately.

Okay, so your in the index and people are finding your site by searching for what their looking for. Your page rank improves a bit. Good for you. Now here's how it really improves: get people to link you. You can start out this process by adding your website to web directories, affiliating with other websites that share your type of content, or adding link buttons/codes so people can easily link you. The other way is just by having plain old good content. When you have a good website, people link you. It's as simple as that. Interactive websites usually have the best way to attract and keep visitors, and have them link you as well.

After that, just sit back and wait. People will link you, your page rank will go up in smaller search engines. Once your rank in the smaller engines go up, it will increase in the larger search engines such as Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, ect. -and when those increase, your that much closer to the #1 Google rank.

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