Forum Moderators: mack
A site in itself does not have a ranking on the search engines. Instead, specific pages of a site will have some ranking for specific keywords they are targeting.
So, for example, my site www.widgets.com might have a page, bluewidgets.htm, for which I am targeting Blue Widgets as the main keyword. My goal is to have that page in the top 10 results when someone types the phrase 'blue widgets' into a search engine.
I would go back and determine which keywords your client is trying to target. Hopefully, you already know this from looking at the site, but be careful -- sometimes people will think they are targeting a keyword, but the site isn't written well enough to for someone (let alone a search engine) to know the keyword that was targeted.
Once you have a list of the keywords you are targeting, you'll have to go out and do some searches for those keywords on the search engines. Stick to Google, Yahoo, and MSN, in that order, since they provide virtually all the search results.
See if any of your client's pages appear in the search results. One way to simplify this is to set the number of results per page to 100, and then use the 'Find' function in your browser to search for the domain name.
Once you get a sense of where your client's pages rank for the keywords you are targeting, you can begin to develop strategies for improving your rankings. There's a lot of information here on WebmasterWorld that should be able to help you along.
I've kept this pretty basic. Hope it helps.
Questions on top of that are: when you are speaking of 'keywords", I am assuming those are the words found in the meta tags - is this correct? Will SE also look at text written on the page itself?
Will SE also look at text written on the page itself?
Yes, but mostly at the top of the page. It won't read all the way to the bottom.
what exactly does this mean? As in it is a flash site or something sdet up in frames that a SE won't/can't search as well?
