better ranking

how can i acheive higher ranking

[craig harris]

Hi

I was wondering if any of you nice people can help me with optimizing my website.
iam trying to acheive top rankings, can anyone please tell me what i can do to get ranked for these key phrases.

Regards

Craig

[edited by: agerhart at 5:57 pm (utc) on Mar. 15, 2004]
[edit reason] please read the TOS [/edit]

[Mohamed_E]

Craig,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

I suggest that you edit your post to remove the URL, it is against our Terms of Service [webmasterworld.com]. In any case, we do not look at sites and make recommendations, we discuss general issues.

I suggest that you begin by reading Brett's excellent post on Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone [webmasterworld.com]. Digest it, then you will have the ability to ask more focussed questions.

[Blue_Wizard]

instead of aiming for a higher ranking
look towards getting a more accurate ranking

I will use google as an example (this isn't an endorsement of their site)
adding a meta tag
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="index">
if you just want google to index (change the bot name to match the site you wish to show up on accurately)
or
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="index">
if you want all robots to visit your site (this can however generate a ton of crap traffic to you site, if bandwidth is an issue use the specific robot names in your tags and robots text, There are handfull of robots out there that are just merciless at recaching your sites graphics almost daily)
to your main index page in the root directory
will invite them to index your site and let them know your friendly (don't waste your time adding that tag to every page in your site)

once you've added it go to
[google.com...] (or the add url page of search engine site you have chosen)
add you site
and as accurate and concise a description of your site
you should see better results within a day or two
(at least it worked for me)

accurate and concise is a must don't try and game the search engine otherwise you will see you ranking plumet even worse

[Macguru]

Hi craig harris,

Mohamed_E provided you with some great links. Great reading.

Sorry Blue_Wizard,

You are waisting your time with the robots tag. By default a SE spider will index amost all pages crawled. This tag is better used if you want to exclude some particular page or restrict crawling outgoing links. It's presence will not improve anything.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="index,follow,ALL"> = is just another line of code waisting bandwith and pushing down the goodies.

[Blue_Wizard]

I'd have to respectfully disagree based on actual experience.
One of the sites I manage was only showing as a hyperlink, with no description for the hyperlink in a major search engine

After adding the meta tags to invite by crawler name and the robots.txt file in the exact manner the web master of that search engine advised me to searches for that one site are significantly more accurate in their descriptions and keyword relevance not only in that search engine but others as well.
And it only took a week after making the change when their spider indexed the site again to see results.
That was two years ago and the improved searchresults have boosted new customer business to that site significantly.

[BMach]

I am sure you have heard this before but getting good quality links that point to your page will do wonders for your site. It takes forever but it starts to pay off. Try to get pages that are related to yours to link to you. Offer them a link on your page. If you don't have a link page, create one with good link titles and descriptions for each site. Try to get them to include one of your keyword phrases in the link text. If you're going to spend the time getting links you might as well get the most out of it. A link with just your website name is ok but links to your site that contain your site name and a keyword phrase will benefit you more than you think. Once you have the links you can play around with optimizing little things on your site to see if it helps. Thats when it becomes fun :) Good luck