There are plenty of ways to increase your search engine rankings once your site is built - pay per click advertising is the most popular and can be effective. But, are you doing the right things from the onset to ensure the engines are properly indexing your site?
While your meta tags and title tags are extremely important to search engine rankings, search engine saturation (how many pages of your site are indexed in a search engine) and search engine popularity (how many sites link to your site) are the two other major factors in where you rank on the search engines for your keywords.
I use a variety of resource sites for comparitive analysis when meeting with potential clients and analyzing our existing sites. My systems uses three tools to find out why your competition is outranking you. Here is my breakdown for researching the competition's rankings and better postion Web sites to rank higher in the search engines.
Step One: Gather the data.
We start by entering your Web address, then the keyword or phrase you are optimizing for. For example, we optimize our Web site for "Web Design Athens". So I would put www.plexusweb.com in as my URL and Web Design Athens for the keyword phrase. My results show that our Web site is ranked on the first page for five out of the six major search engines.
Step 2: Find out who your competition is for that keyword phrase.
From the results offered by the Keyword Verification Tool I employ, I click on each of the search engine names. It provides information on the 1st page of results for those keywords for each search engine. I make a list of the URLs of the top couple of sites in each engine.
Step 3: Compare the Web site address with a couple of the competing sites that came up in the top of the search engines.
This reports how many other sites link to the site in questions and to those other competition sites. 99% of the time, the sites that outrank your site on your specified keywords have more link popularity than you and this is why they outrank you.
Step 4: Analyze The data.
Now that you know who outranks you and why, so do something about it. Our reporting provides you with a hyperlink under each of the results of numbers in each search engine. If you click the links, you will get a list of all the Web sites linking to your competition on those engines. The goal is to get your site linked to as many of those same sites as you can. Some sites have reciprocal linking policies and you can actually fill out a form and add your link, some will require you email them a request, etc. It is hard work but that is the only way to get higher in the search engines without paying for it!
