Search engines are the simplest means of directing internet traffic to your website. The site thus needs to be ranked highly in each major search engine including Google, Yahoo and Bing to capture this traffic and bring potential clients to view your product or service.  There are various ways of increasing this ranking in the search engines.

First, a website must have a site map. This section has links to all the main pages of the website.  Having a sitemap will ensure that the search engine spiders will find these pages, index them and rank them accordingly.  There are many free and easy sitemap tools available online.  Once you have created your sitemap, be sure to either submit it to the major search engines or put a link to it on your site so it can be easily found.

Next, social bookmarking capabilities are essential in order to enable the site’s visitors to bookmark the content. This creates important links which the search engines will then utilize in the ranking of your site. The online marketer can choose from many available free social bookmarking widgets available from the internet.  These will allow site visitors to easily tweet about your site on Twitter, post a comment on their Facebook wall, or bookmark it elsewhere. These sites are cached regularly and will definitely lead to the search engine’s notation.

Another tip is deep linking. This is the creation of a hyperlink that links to pages on your site other than the main page.  Since your homepage will generally be linked to by other blogs or websites, it is critical to build links to these deeper pages to help with their rankings and drive targeted traffic.

Articles syndication and forum posting is another way of getting noticed. Articles appearing on major sites like Ezine Articles allow for two links in the publisher box which remain for many years. In addition, you can give permission for other webmasters and bloggers to republish your article if they leave these links intact.  As a result, one article can be syndicated across many blogs and websites, providing many links back to your website.  This enables the search engines to easily crawl your site and also builds authority for your website which helps improve the site’s ranking. 

These are just but a few of the tips one can use. If they don’t work, more research can still give you more tips.

About the author

Dav Gra is interested in the latest trends of search engine optimization, as well as software which allows real-time collaboration for distributed teams.  He regularly uses this flowchart freeware which is available as an iPad flowchart app to create flowcharts, diagrams, mind maps and other documents online.