BETTER SEARCH ENGINE RANK

What You Need To Do For A Better Search Engine Rank

The most important thing for you to do as someone seeking more traffic from the search engines is to determine how your existing prospects and customers find your web site if they don't know what the URL or domain name is. So, you have to get inside their heads and think like they think.

One way you can do this is to examine your server logs. In these, you will see what terms that people are using to find your web site. If you run a Google Adwords or Yahoo Sponsored Search campaign, or you use any other paid search methods, look at your results and see what are the terms, key phrases and keywords that are most often bringing traffic to your web site.

That can be very helpful in finding out what terms are most commonly used to find your site. If the prospects are clicking on the paid ads for a particular term then we want to try to optimize the free results for the same terms.

If you are willing to we can examine your Adwords account directly, or you can run a report or just let us know anecdotally. Ultimately it is in your interest to make sure that the keywords, search terms and key phrases that you are doing the search engine optimization on your site are the ones that people will find you on, and then convert according to your business model.

The first thing we do, once we know what terms you are seeking to be optimized for is to benchmark where the site is now for those important terms. We will usually benchmark for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live (formerly MSN).

Many clients want to optimize for everything, and we can try to do that, but we advise against it. These days with search being a very mature field, it is best to focus on niche and "long tail" searches.

Maybe you don't want a term as general as that anyway. You will find that searchers who are very focused on a particular thing are more likely to convert. For example, we had a great client who ran surfing vacations. He wanted to be optimized for the term "action sport". We advised him that it is unlikely that someone who is a base jumper is going to enter in "action sport" and then decide, "hey, I'll go surfing instead".

Also, think about who you may be able to use as a link partner. Link partners may be the web sites of suppliers, vendors, distributors, customers, industry groups, trade associations and friends.