Tim Matheson Blog - Productive Tips and More

Getting High Search Engine Rankings for FREE!

Many people ask “How can I get high search engine rankings for free?” Well I don’t know about FREE because ranking high in the search engines is hard work. So unless you consider your time to be invaluable then high rankings in the SERPS (Search – Engine –Results – Pages) is not technically FREE. You can do it by spending little or no money. I will attempt to explain SERPS the best I can so that others may learn from what I learned the hard way.

Ok you have just completed your ultra cool new homepage and now you want to top it off with some good quality traffic. Maybe you’re promoting a new product or service you provide. Whatever the case your website’s best friend is the search engine. Search engines are where people turn when they need information about anything and everything. They are essentially the backbone of the internet. Search Engine Traffic is very important to any successful website. You need visitors or all your hard work will go unnoticed. So what do you do to generate this traffic and get everyone talking about your new website?

First let’s start by learning what the search engines consider when determining placement for a website in the search engine results pages. I will be mainly referencing Google in this article because it’s a major player and if you’re in with Google usually the others will follow. SEO is no big secret most of these practices have been in use for years. As technology prevails search engines become more critical as to what they consider to be quality relevant content. I have taken the time to list some of the most important things to consider when optimizing a site for Google.

Content is king – Content is very important, I can not say it is the most important thing but, content does contribute to a fair portion of your search engine success. By having lots of content that is related to your search terms can make a big impact on your placement in the search engines. So write lots of useful articles on your site that relate to the terms you want to rank highest for. This does two things for you, it gives your visitors a reason to want to visit your site and also gives people a reason to want to link to your site.

Link popularity – link popularity is based on the amount of inbound links a site receives from other websites. The best inbound links are links from other websites that have related content to your site and already has a good ranking in the search engines. Another thing is you want your keywords and keyphrases to appear in the anchor text of the actual text. Anchor text is the actual link text itself and is most often shown in blue and underlined. The more links you have with your keywords and keyphrases the higher you will rank for those terms on Google. There are many ways to go about getting links to your site however it is beyond the scope of this article but I plan to post an article dedicated to link building soon.

Title tags -Title tags are found in the head of an html document and provide a descriptive title for the content of each document. Title tags are a good place to put one or two keywords or phrases but don’t over do it. Your title tags should be neat and descriptive or you will find your self on page 10 of Google. Keep it short and sweet and try to throw in a keyword or two.

Description tags – Description tags are also found in the head of an html document. They provide a description of your website and its content. This is also a good place to sprinkle a few keywords here and there. They should provide a relevant description of what the page is all about. This will usually (depending on the search engine) be displayed underneath the title of the page in the SERPS.

Robots.txt Files – Robots.txt files are basically a set of guidelines for the search engine spider to follow. They inform the spider of where it is and where it is not welcome. The robots.txt file is just a plain old text file named robots.txt and lives in the root directory of the web server. A standard robots text file would probably look something like this.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/

Ok let’s examine what is going on here the first part of this file begins with the string
User-agent: * this is the part that tells the spider it is giving it an instruction. The * or asterisk is a wild card and lets all spiders know that the following applies to them. You can specify rules for individual spiders like this User-agent: Googlebot which would cause the rule to only apply to Googles spider googlebot. There are several hundreds of spiders out there such as inktomi, MSNBot and more. You can usually find the names of spiders visiting your site in your statistics pages. The next string you will see is a Disallow: /cgi-bin/ this tells the spider not to crawl the directory /cgi-bin/ and is a good practice to follow when it comes to your cgi-bin directory. Any directory you do not specify an instruction for is fair game for the spider to index. Take some time to develop a good robots.txt file for your site.

Build a sitemap – Sitemaps are exactly what you would think a site map is they are a map of the websites content. These maps are made up of text links and are used by spiders and visitors to quickly find information or resources on your site. Spiders like sitemaps and they can help the spider to index deep into your site to second, third, and fourth level pages and further. Sitemaps are a good way to ensure that all of your pages get spidered. They don’t have to be fancy in fact most site maps are better off not being to fancy. This is just a list of links to all the pages on your website. Sort of like a directory when you enter a large building. Google recently introduced a new way for webmasters to let Google know about new additions to their site called Google sitemaps. There is a complete instructional page that can be viewed here.

By keeping these things in mind when optimizing your website you can gain high search engine ranking fairly quickly. Remember to find quality links to your site and include keywords in the anchor text. This will ensure your ranking for the correct terms in Google. Happy ranking everyone I hope this article was of some help to you.

Tim Matheson