Categories
How To Guides

How to improve your Google ranking

Improve your search engine rank in the search results for Google. Chances are, if you have entered “how to improve my Google ranking” into Google and found this article, this is exactly what you are looking to do! You could save yourself the time and effort & simply send us your requirements, and let the professionals do it. Forget the Yahoo, Altavista, MSN and AOL search engines, Google is currently reigning as king!

1) What is a search engine rank and SERP?

When you perform a search with Google, Yahoo, AOL or MSN etc, the search engine results are the list of sites that the search engine considers to be relevant to the words that you type in. The search engine results themseves are ordered by relevancy i.e. the search engine displays the sites that it thinks are most likely to meet your needs at the top of the page. Hence your search engine rank is the position in the search engine results that your site is listed for a particular search term, word or phrase.

There is another ranking, which is “Google Page Ranking”, and this is a score given to your page by the Google search engine. If you download the Google Toolbar you can see the ranking of every page on the internet. Interestingly, the Google search pages give other non-Google pages higher scores than Google itself.

The Search Engine Ranking is also known as SERP which stands for search engine results position.

2) What are the main search engines?

There are quite literally hundreds of thousands of search engines, meta-search engines and directories used across the web, both specialist and generalist, but the vast majority of searches are performed using Google. The latest research points to over 80% of searches being via Google, with a very small number of searches in comparison being through Yahoo and the other poorer cousins. Others include:

AOL search engine
MSN search engine
Yahoo directory and search engine
Hotbot search engine
BOTW search engine
Business.com search engine
Altavista search engine
Lycos search engine

3) Why is my search engine rank important?

Your search engine rank is very important if you want your business to get noticed on the internet. Millions of people, both consumers and businesses, spend many hours online performing millions of searches every day looking to buy pretty much every type of goods and services available. The trend is growing (something like 20% of all sales will be online by 2015) and more and more businesses are turning first to the web to find new suppliers.

The internet has been likened to the high street – if you have a shop in the middle of a housing estate, no-one on the high street is going to see it. If you are not on the first page of search results, or at least the second, you may as well not bother trying very hard…

If your website ranks highly for your search keywords, then you are on the way towards having lots of people want to see your site. Prospective customers will then come and visit and if they like what they see they will contact you. A website operates whilst you are asleep…

4) How can I improve my site’s search engine rank?

There are a lot of things you can do, and the whole process is very time consuming. Firstly you can submit your site to the search engines (Google has a new site moratorium that lasts a year, but we have already demonstrated with our own sites that there are ways round this). Make sure that the pages in your site include the keywords your prospective customers going to search for! Obvious really, but so many sites we come across do not do this. A good example of this is a flashy site with lots of graphics but little content.

Each search engine uses a different fomula to calculate the ranking of websites in results pages. Optimising web pages to improve rank in a particular search engine is often done at the expense of other search engines. Usuaully a balanced approach to search engine optimisation works better than one targetted at a specific formula, although Google is the one to pay attention to. There are a range of important aspects of web design that your web designer needs to pay attention to in making a search engine friendly and well ranked website. These include:

keyword selection – the keywords and phrases that you are optimising for
keyword density – how close together the keywords / key phrases are within the page (i.e. proximity)
keyword frequency – how often your keywords appear in the page (too low a keyword density and you will slip down the rankings and too high a keyword density and you will be penalised for ‘keyword spamming’!!)
title tag text – the web page’s title
H1 heading tag text – text contained within the page’s H1 tag
keywords meta tag
descriptions meta tag
image alt tags
anchor text
frames
domain name / path name / file name
text content – content is the main item that will keep visitors coming back to your site again and again, regardless of how it looks, and what pictures you have on there.. 

5) Why use Chester Web Marketing to improve my search engine rank?

We take your website, and put it out there to users across the world. We use proven methodology for search engine optimisation that will increase targeted traffic to your website from organic (free) search engine listings.
We do not use link farms, which can not only boost your ranking considerably and quickly, but can also decrease your ranking just as rapidly when Google find out. Our ethos is to do marketing online that does not cost you money. We get your site seen but without needing to spend large amounts of money to do so.

Web designers often claim that they are SEO experts. This is usually nonsense, and they simply sign you up to an automated account with one of the big multinationals such as Ineedhits. This sort of service does not work to market your site, and will not create a web presence for your company. 

Web design and search engine optimisation are different… would you let a painter and decorator design your house, or would you let an architect decorate your house?

We start optimising your site very quickly, but the service is ongoing. We can work within most budgets.
We take time to understand your business, your main thrust of sales and marketing, and we use this information to put together an online marketing strategy.

Chester Web Marketing offers risk free, affordable and guaranteed results!

6) What do I do next to improve my site search engine rank?

If you want to use our service, please visit www.chesterwebmarketing.co.uk and fill out our online quote request form. What have you got to lose? You will gain customers you never knew existed, and for a very limited cost.