Does Your Site Deserve A Top Ten Search Engine Ranking? (Part 2)

If you make a proper evaluation of your website you may actually discover that compared to your competitors offerings you really dont deserve a top spot in the search engine rankings. However, there are some steps you can take to improve your company, improve your website and improve your rankings in the search engine queries related to your product or service.

In my last article on this subject (http://www.a1-optimization.com/Top-search-engine-ranking%20.htm) I outlined five factors which separate the leading sites from the others in any particular field. Lets look at what you can do to improve your performance in these areas.

1. Take steps to become an industry leader:

The top sites displayed in a search engine query should belong to those sites that really offer the goods and services that best answer the question posed by the search engine user. More often than not, those top rankings are captured by industry leaders or companies that offer either a wide variety of goods or top services in that field.

When it comes to becoming an industry leader you have to be realistic. There is no point in trying to compete with a Fortune 500 company when you are a one-woman part-time business. But you can select your niche and compete there.

When you have your niche clearly defined, add the services and products and information that will match and surpass those of your competitors. If your fundamental product or service is really of value then you should be able to build a website that reflects this value and sooner or later the search engines will pick up on this.

So review your current products and services. Take a look at what your competitors are doing, and add new products and services or improve existing ones so that you are among the best in your particular Internet niche.

2. Make your site look as good as the products and services you are offering.

Just as you would not go to a business meeting in shabby dress, your website should look clean and professional. If you have to spend some money to get your website redesigned, then consider it money well-spent, because you will more than earn it back in higher sales in the months and years ahead.If you do choose to redesign or upgrade your website, make sure that you find a web designer who is able to build search-engine friendly web pages.

3. Enrich the Content of Your Website:

Both search engines and web users appreciate a site with a lot of information. It doesnt cost you anything to add new pages to your website, so publish articles, reviews, news and information about your product and services. Each of those new pages will function as a mini-website, attracting searchers who make queries for the words and phrases appearing on those pages.

Write your own articles and product reviews or use those of others. Writing your own articles and reviews is actually easier than you think. If you publish a website then you already have a particular expertise or interest in your particular field. It is just a question of sharing this knowledge with others in a direct manner (see my article http://www.a1-optimization.com/article-writing-tips.htm for simple Internet article-writing guidelines).

If you do not want to write your own articles, then take advantage of free content that is available at places like www.ideamarketing.com, www.articlecity.com or on the article groups at Yahoo (http://groups.yahoo.com). When you enter the Yahoo groups area, make a search for: free articles, articles for reprint.

4. Become an Authority in Your Field: As you are already an expert in your field, let the world know about it. If you write articles, publish them on your site, put them in your newsletter and then get them distributed and published on other websites. You can distribute in the same places where you find articles for reprint.

Contribute to forums and Internet discussions related to your website.Send out press releases about your website and your enterprise. One leading online press release service is www.prweb.com , and there are others as well.

Apply for a listing in www.dmoz.org (Open Directory Project) and other leading directories. A listing in a recognized directory is given much importance by Google and other search engines.

Finally, dont forget the off-line world. Try to get an appearance on radio talk shows, send out press releases and get coverage in newspapers, magazines and other offline media.

5. Get an Early Start:

The longer you have been around, the easier it is for your site to get a high ranking. So, register your new domain name as soon as you get the idea for your business, even if you dont think you will be operational for some months to come. When your domain is registered publish a holding page, a page with some preliminary information. Get links to this holding page from already existing websites (ask your friends, colleagues, your web designer and others to make links to you.)

All of this may sound like hard work, but the rewards can be great. Despite all the obstacles, the Internet offers a huge opportunity for individuals and small businesses to reach out to a large audience. If you work diligently and systematically the day will come when your website achieves a top search engine ranking.

Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor, and social worker. He has beenworking on the Internet since 1995 and is the proprietor of A1-Optimization, , a firm providing search engine optimization,copywriting, reciprocal linking, and other web promotion services. Hepublishes a monthly ezine, A1-Web Promotion Tips, available at

Optimization Tips for the New MSN Search Engine

The great and often-quoted baseball player Yogi Berra once said: You can observe a lot by just watching. Thats what I have been doing with the new MSN search engine that was recently launched with a lot of fanfare.

I observed two interesting things which I would like to pass on to you.

If you put a keyword rich paragraph near the top of the page, either in the first or second paragraph, then your page may do well in search requests for the keywords in that paragraph. I put may in quotation marks because it is not guaranteed.

If a page is well optimized in all aspects, this initial paragraph can give you the oomph that is needed to make a good showing at MSN. That is what happened in the case of a few of my new clients sites.

Stating exactly what you are doing and describing it plainly right at the start is good practice in any case because most people spend only a few seconds on a web site. If the first paragraph is clear then it is to your advantage if you want to keep a restless surfer on your page.

I did some more keyword searches and then noticed another preference of the new search engine. When searching for some keywords I found one or two sites highly placed in the rankings, but their main contents had little to do with the keywords. However, at the very bottom of the pages they did have links to another site with those keywords in the clickable link text.

There are two things that can be learned from this:

1. keywords placed inside link text are considered important by search engines, because they indicate that your page is genuinely dealing with those keywords by giving more references to them.

2. keywords placed at the very end of a page are important because it tells the search engine that a page which started out describing a concept such as search engine optimization is still talking about it even at the very end.

Putting keywords in a strong paragraph at the beginning, putting keywords in link text, and repeating keywords near the end of a page are not new ideas. This has always been part of good optimization practice, and it also makes good sense in terms of providing solid information for website users.

However, it is the emphasis on these elements in the new MSN search engine that is interesting. In any case, try your hand at it and see if you can tweak your pages so that you do well in the MSN engine, and the others as well.