Welcome to Winning The Search Engine Ranking Wars

You have submitted it to a few web sites and are waiting for the traffic and customers to come along.

After a few weeks you are still waiting. And waiting. And waiting...

You thought your site was great. Why don’t people come flocking to it?

The probable answer is – because they don't know it's there.

Have you any idea how many millions – or even billions – of sites there are on the web? Type in any popular keyword into a search engine and there will probably be several million results for that keyword. How often do you look further than the first page – or at least the second? So how often do you think other people do?

If you want people to see your site, it is essential that you get it on the first page for your main keywords – that is, one of the top ten results for your keywords. Without this, you have virtually no hope of succeeding in your business, because nobody will see your site.

So how do you go about getting on that first page? The process for doing this is known as Search Engine Optimization. You may have heard of this but thought it seemed too difficult or technical, so you decided to leave it to the experts and avoid thinking about it.

Well, you have to think about it if you want to succeed. And it is not as difficult as you might think. Here are four things you can easily do, and you must do, to bring visitors to your site.

First of all, go to your site and look at the title bar. This is the bar right at the top, usually with white lettering on a blue background. This is important because it is the first thing visitors and search engines see. So what have you got there? Make sure that the title bar contains your most important keywords. But first you have to decide what your most important keywords are.

Your keywords are the words people are likely to type into the search engines when they are looking for your product or service. When choosing keywords you need to be specific – for instance, if your site is selling wine-making equipment, don’t choose “wine”, or even “wine making”, but “wine-making equipment”, or “wine-making supplies”. Check with a keyword search facility like Overture which keywords in your field are searched for most, and use the popular ones to optimize your site.

Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking - Part 2 follows...