How to get a high ranking in the search engines

Just 5 years ago getting a high ranking in the search engines was easy. As search engines have gotten smarter it has become impossible to get a high ranking in the search engines with gimmicks. Now the only way is to have one of the best pages about your topic. Before explaining how to get high rankings in the search engines it is important to understand some basics about search engines.

Understanding search engines to you can get a high ranking.

If your ran a search engine what would be your number one goal. This one is simple, you would want to be the most used search engine on the Internet. The only way to become number one is accuracy. People use a search engine for one reason and that is to find what they are looking for. When I first started using the Internet 5 years ago, it was difficult to find anything in a search engine. You type in baby toys and you got hundreds of sex toy sites with a few baby toys sites mixed in. Now you type in baby toys and you get baby toys. The reason Google became number one was that for several years they had the most accurate results. So if you want to get a high ranking in a search engine for the terms your pages are about then you must give the search engine what it is looking for.

The search engines became more accurate because now they look primarily at one thing. That one think is content. The only way for a search engine to find out what a page is about is to scan the page and see what it is about. Yes, there a few other things the search engine looks at but none of those things matter if the content does not match what people are typing in a search engine. So if you want to rank high in the search engines you must make a great page specifically about the topic that page is about.

Before you build your content to get a high ranking in the search engines

It is best to start with what the search engines look at first. This is the domain name to your site. If your site is about baby toys you are not going to put baseball gloves in your domain name. The search engines know this. That is why if you get your key terms in your domain name it can help you get a higher ranking in the search engine. If you have a baseball glove site and decide to sell baby toys as well then you are at a disadvantage. It this is the case then you can make a folder called baby toys. It would look like this http://www.baseballgloves.com/babytoys or http://wwwbaseball-gloves.com/baby-toys. It is always best to have the key terms in the main URL than a folder.

Not every page in your site is going to be about the same subject as your main page. If you have a baseball glove site you may want to have some information about the history of the game or the hall of fame. You can get the key words to the specific page not only with a folder but with the htm page as well. http://www.baseballgloves.com.history/halloffame.htm. Do not worry if you separate the key words by a - or _. The search engines are smart enough to parse out the words.

Deciding on key words before building content pages to get a high ranking in search engines.

Many people think about the key words on their main page. But do not realize that you need to think about the key words for every page you build. You need to ask your self what need do I want to meet by building this page. People search with a need for information. If you want someone to find a specific page in your site then it has to match what someone is searching for. On my arthritis site every page I have built has had a purpose. There are some articles that I use that do not. It does not take time to add an article to my site but it does take time to build a page. The purpose of the articles section of the web page is to have extra content to keep them at the page and not to get them to the page. If they read through the list of over 100 articles the may see a dozen they want to read. This not only keeps them at the site but also brings them back. Even then I think about keywords when adding the title and description to the site and sometimes an introductory paragraph.

One of the big questions I am ask is how do I decide on key words. First you need to know what people are search for. Overtures keyword selector tool is a great place to start. The first thing you need to realize is not to get greedy. When I started my arthritis site it was not my goal at first to be ranked on the first page with the term arthritis. There is a ton of competition for that term. Many sites with big budgets, long history and medical connections to provide top quality links made that term difficult to get. It was my goal to get there eventually so the first work of my domain name is arthritis. My main index page went after a key word phrase as does every page in my site. With in two months I was number one in Google with that key word phrase. Then every page I built was around a key word phrase. Click here for an example search on the keyword selector tool.

As I mentioned above. Do not get greedy. It is better to have dozens of pages of lesser search terms on the first two pages than none of the major search terms. In two months I had over one hundred pages that showed up on the first two pages for their search terms and a couple of dozen that were either number 1 or 2. This was hard work because it required that a build two to three pages a day. Because of this I was getting several thousand hits a day.

How do I build the content into the page for a high ranking position in the search engines.

The first thing is to put the key word phrase in the meta title and description of the page. You can add it into the keywords if you like but no major search engine looks at keywords any more. Next is to title the page at the top with an <h1> header. The next is to make sure your key word phrase shows up at least twice in your first paragraph. The make sure the keyword phrase shows up in most paragraphs on the page especially the first three or four.. Then if the page can be divided into sections, make an <h2> header for each section and include the key word phrase in each.

Next if your page has graphics on it then add an alt tag for each graphic with the key word in the alt tag. It is best to make the alt tag into a sentence and not just tag it with the key word phrase.

Warning do not try to just stack key words on the page. Search engines caught on to that a long time ago. I is a good way to make sure you do not show up at all.

Page rank for a high position in the search engines.

Page rank is a term used to describe the popularity of your page at Google. The more competition there is for the key word phrase the more important it is to get your popularity up in order to get that high rank in the search engines. Popularity is not how much traffic you get but how many people link to your page. And not just any links but quality links to your page.

Not all links are created equal. One way links are the best. There has been much discussion about reciprocal linking over the years. This is still good at some search engines but it appears that Google is no longer counting links to your site if you link back to them. The higher the page rank on the page the better the link is. You can tell the page rank of a page by adding the Google tool bar to your browser. I do not trade links often anymore. I have to be really impressed by you site and it has to have a page rank of at least 4. We have added the most comprehensive page on getting one way links.  This page will help you immensely in getting the page rank of your site up.