improve your website findability: 16 DIY tips to improve your search engine ranking (higher position in search results)

Web site findability is now big business on the Internet. But the bulk of the know how does not require costly consultancy. I have spent quite some time to get top ranking with my website www.metatest.nl. The list of tips below is the result of my quest for getting better ranking with the popular search engines.

all findability tips:

1. Content As Google puts it: make pages for human visitors, not for search engines. Visitors are looking for good quality content. Content usually means words. All too often we see pages that are simply too short. Write more about your product, service, hobby or about yourself or whatever it is your page is about. It needs WORDS. More relevant words leads to higher ranking. A 300 word page will outrank a 100 word page (all other factors being equal).


2. Title This is the single factor most web pages still get wrong. So much is gained with a good page title, all attempts at fooling the search engines pale at the effect of using a short, accurate descriptive title. I have seen pages stuffing their (hardly used) keywords meta tag with hundreds of irrelevant keywords and leaving their page title a mere 'Home Page'. (Believe you me: a page named 'Home Page' will not get high ranking with search engines).


3. Site map Create a site map. Best learn from the Google pages how to do this.


4. URL search words Put two or three of your search words into the url of the page.


5. Avoid 'reserved words' in the URL Make sure your dynamic scripts do not require arguments that are named 'ID' or 'NAME'.


6. Meta tags Highly overrated, but do not get them wrong, and don't waste your time on them.


7. Submit your url with the popular search engines Well of course, but what are the tips and common pit falls here?


8. Understand how the www works Search results consist of web pages, not websites. Search engines serve page results, so don't bank on your index page as the one and only front door to your website. Each page that has sufficient content, could be a page a visitor lands on.


9. work on your link popularity Link popularity is one of the determining factors for a top search engine ranking. Link popularity means the number of Web sites linking to your site. However, the quality of links is more important than the quantity of links. For instance, if the New York Times links to your site, their single link might count a lot more than 30 links from your friends' personal homepage. By now, all top search engines use link popularity in their ranking formulas. For Google, it's alledgedly the most important factor in ranking sites.
   The idea behind link popularity is that other Web sites will link to your site only if you are a quality site offering quality resources. So if many Web sites link to your site, search engines come to the conclusion that your site must be very popular and deserves a high ranking. In other words, external approval raises a page's ranking.
   Link popularity can do a lot for your site. Not only will the most important search engines rank you higher, but links from other sites will also drive more traffic to you.
   In addition, as more sites link to you, the odds increase that search engine spider programs will encounter your site more regularly so that it's less likely that they drop your site from their index.
   How to improve the link popularity of your Web site:
   You can search the search engines for Web sites that are related to your business, find the webmaster's contact information and then solicit a reciprocal link. Do this every day and your link popularity will climb steadily but slowly. And it's very time-consuming.


10. Fresh, up to date content Supply new content regularly. Pages that do not change, will slowly see their ranking drop.


11. Avoid 'frames'Many search engines have problems with frames. They often only index the frameset page and not the individual frames that contain the actual content. Unfortunately, the frameset page usually doesn't have META tags, title and enough content (text) to obtain a listing on a search engine.
    The best solution to this problem would be to avoid frames. Let me say that again: avoid using frames!


12. Structure Structure helps humanoids and search engines gauge the relevance of your content. Using good old fashioned HTML actually helps to improve your ranking. How? Example: putting an H1 element around a sentence, normally signifies this is an important sentence that describes what the next section of text will be about. So, the words in this sentence (search engines will assume) potentially represent search terms. The same goes for many other elements.


13. Hyperlinks Search engines love hyperlinks. It's what the www is all about. Your internal links should represent a well connected site. Links to other sites, boost the ranking of those sites. Make sure you use the ALT attribute on both your internal and external links. The words that are associated with these links, will get associated with these pages. Test your links with our


14. Afbeeldingen en het ALT attribuut Afbeeldingsbestanden worden uiteraard niet door zoekmachines doorzocht. Zoekmachines zijn als het ware blind. Daarom kan het effectief zijn om afbeeldingen van ALT attributen te voorzien met daarin goede beschrijvingen die de relatie tussen de zoekwoorden en de pagina versterken.


15. Technieken en standaarden Bepaalde technieken kunnen de werking van zoekmachinespiders dwarsbomen. Het volgen van webstandaarden kan je behoeden voor fouten die je vindbaarheid verslechteren. Test eventueel je website op zoekmachinevriendelijkheid met de


16. robots.txt file Optioneel, voor de fine-tuning van je vindbaarheid en vooral voor het 'schoon' houden van je zoekresultaten. Niet al je pagina's zijn relevant voor gebruikers (en dus niet voor zoekmachines).