Quite often a small business websites have trouble making their way in their ranking on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) such as Bing, Google and Yahoo. This makes a small or medium sized business owner ask, "Why is my website not ranking in search
engines?" The trouble you may have can range from your website's basic design, your site's keywords, or your site's optimization. First and foremost, you have to think about how users are going to get to your website...
Good KeywordsKeywords are extremely important when it comes to your website ranking. In fact, almost the whole of web marketing is surrounded by finding and optimizing around proper keywords. So what can go wrong with keywords? Many businesses have difficulty getting into the mindset of someone trying to find their website. Most people search for generalities, rather than highly specific things. For example, someone is more likely to search "Hardware stores in Albuquerque" than they are "Buy wooden shims in Albuquerque." Certain keywords can be rather irrelevant, and as such are a huge waste of space and time.
Often, people will toss a few keywords into their meta tags, and expect Google or other search engines to find them and use them. Surely they'll find it, but only a few keywords in a meta tag isn't the best thing in the world. For proper and complete coverage in SERPs, you need to actually use those keywords within your web design! For example, if your keywords include the word "precision drilling," be sure to use that exact phrase in the text of your website. This can do wonders for ranking a small business website, as it can massively boost your results when it comes to particular keywords, on those pages where the text is shown.
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Of course, it is at times it is challenging to find creative things to do with a website, not just in terms of web design, but in terms of keywords. One of the biggest issues that happen to people looking to increase their website ranking is that they go for keywords that are far too overused. If your website is entering into a results page that has over 200,000 results for the keyword "food," odds are you aren't going to be getting to the top any time soon. For this reason, it's highly important that you find something that, while not overused, is still specific to your industry.
One of the biggest things that Google and other search engines do nowadays is search for pages that they know are being linked to frequently. It's a pretty standard aspect of web design and web marketing nowadays. The more often search engines see that you are being referenced by other sites, the more likely they are to up your ranking! It's effectively a form of synergy. If an independent blog, or even your own Facebook or Twitter page is able to link back to your website, the more likely it is that the search engine will bump up your rank. Remember, search engines want people to find exactly what they are looking for, and if they perceive a web page as "popular," then it stands to reason there will be more people seeking this site in particular!
