What is the best starting point of increasing the ranking in search engines?

koochi · 08-26-2008, 06:32 AM

Hi guys, I work for a pilot aptitude tests prep. company. It currently has a website. We are trying to increase the ranking of our website in the main search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Is there any tips about search engine optimization? What is the best starting point? Any commend is welcomed. Thx!

sphinx26 · 08-26-2008, 07:37 AM

Search engine optimization requires patience and it takes time to rank your site, better start your optimization at your own site, focus on title, keywords, description, and meta tags.

GSources · 08-26-2008, 10:24 AM

Meta Tags are not as important as other factors in SEO. Google ignores them nowadays. It only looks for Google Meta Tags, which are used specifically by Google. You don't need these tags unless you want google to do something very specific, like not allow caching of the site.

The most important part is the content on the site. You want to produce fairly unique content with a nice selection of keywords on the page (not to be confused with meta keywords). It is a good idea to repeat key words a few times on a page so that search engines recognise it as important.

You should also have enough content on the website. A website with many pages of content will be indexed quicker and at a better rank as a result. You do not want to overflow your page with too much text, images etc but you also do not want to fill it too much - it will give the search engines a lot more work and also the visitors will not want to read huge chunks of text.

Adding headings to your content organises it very nicely for visitors to see but also the Headers used in HTML can act as keywords to search engines.

A Site Map is quite a useful feature to have as it allows webcrawlers and users to easily find your content.

Complying with web standards can help with SEO but it isn't the most important thing. There are many websites that do not validate their HTML/XHTML content and do well in the ranks. However, it is a good idea to validate it for many other reasons. For example, those with some kind of browser handicap want to be able to view the site as close as possible to the intentional functioning and look the designer/programmer wanted.

It is also a good idea to make sure your website works in all the main browsers. You should cater for the majority of users if you are serious about getting the visitors. If someone can't visit the site because they can't view it properly, they are not going to come back or recommend the site to someone else.

Nearly all designers build their websites whilst checking the view in Mozilla Firefox browser but you also must make sure it looks and runs fine in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. There is a lot of debate to if designers should allow compatibility with version 6 (IE 6). There are a high proportion of designers that ignore version 6 and just work towards version 7.

IE 6 is quite possibly the most hated browser in Web Development history with it's terrible rendering of CSS code and incompatibilities with many of the functions. In my opinion, I would cater for Firefox and IE 7 and just make sure the site is adequate to use in IE 6 - at least for complex designs. I tend to use some PHP detection for the browsers and if IE 6 or below is detected, I display a notice at the top of the website suggesting the user upgrade.

There are many other things you can do to help SEO but there are just a few of them. I am not an expert in this field but it may help. SEO is by far the hardest part of web development in my opinion,

axedbydax · 08-26-2008, 11:18 AM

Nice post and explanation from Gsources. I guess when it comes to design, follow Gsources...after that as sphinx26 says, on page optimization. Start looking for a keyword that will surely bring traffic to your site. Then, after setting up your site(on-page optimization), you are ready for the off-page optimization which is link building.Link building can be done in many ways. Forum posting, blog posting(high PR), directory submission, minimal link exchange, social bookmarking, article writing, squidoo lens, hubs and many others. If you need guidance, visit my blog. its all about SEO for Newbies.

GSources · 08-26-2008, 11:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by axedbydax

Nice post and explanation from Gsources. I guess when it comes to design, follow Gsources...after that as sphinx26 says, on page optimization. Start looking for a keyword that will surely bring traffic to your site. Then, after setting up your site(on-page optimization), you are ready for the off-page optimization which is link building.Link building can be done in many ways. Forum posting, blog posting(high PR), directory submission, minimal link exchange, social bookmarking, article writing, squidoo lens, hubs and many others. If you need guidance, visit my blog. its all about SEO for Newbies.

Thank you for that - I am still learning myself (still a nooby compared to other people I know). I just hope my advise is beneficial to people.

markus · 08-26-2008, 06:25 PM

use 100% flash

But seriously, title tags are up there.
And content, along with keywords included.
Don't dismiss meta tags, include them. But don't spend a lot of time there.
It's about the links.
But for on page, use H tags, bold, and a good internal link structure.
Don't forget a site map.
And more inbound links with the phrases you want to be found for.

Create good content > promote
Rinse > repeat

Bobo99 · 08-26-2008, 06:27 PM

Once you have optimized the content of your site you should start submitting your site to directories and posting in blogs. This will help get your site backlinks which will help with your rank

koochi · 08-26-2008, 10:39 PM

thanks for all the replies

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GSources · 08-27-2008, 04:16 AM

Try to find link exchanges with only related websites - which means if you want to submit to a directory, put it in the right section.

mit · 08-27-2008, 05:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by koochi

Hi guys, I work for a pilot aptitude tests prep. company. It currently has a website. We are trying to increase the ranking of our website in the main search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Is there any tips about search engine optimization? What is the best starting point? Any commend is welcomed. Thx!

Do On-site optimization for your site. It should be search engine friendly.

Nobby · 08-27-2008, 06:22 AM

Koochi, you sound like a beginner at this, i am currently writing guides on SEO for beginners, my first offerings can be found here: SEO for beginners

Hope thats of use.

netsearch · 08-27-2008, 12:53 PM

Get links from pages google likes for your keywords
If you can get the sites that google list for you keywords to link to you this should help you a lot. linking to some of them may help you too.
you may want to link to the FAA web site www.faa.gov google is look more at outbound links these days