 Boosting your website ranking
Wednesday, 20 July 2005
I received a phone call from a mate of mine who was approached by an “internet marketing” company claiming they can boost his business website’s ranking in search engines. He wanted to know if it was a good investment.
I said “no”. This is why:
Even though you may dearly love your website to reach the top of search engine rankings, having relevant text content is still the most important thing you can do. Do not pay internet marketing companies to increase your ranking in search engines.
You would almost always be better off asking a web designer you trust for advice on meta tags and keywords. My experience has shown that all too often a decent web designer will have a much better knowledge of search engine optimisation than any tele marketer.
The most popular search engines are those that crawl the internet and index text and links on pages they find. When they finish indexing the website they are on, they will then follow the links to other websites in order to index those as well. It’s for this reason alone that the single most important thing you can do (apart from provide good content) is:
Ask your business associates to add your website link to their own websites.
This is the single most important criteria that Google, for instance, uses to determine website relevancy. Apart from being the most popular, Google is also one among the very few search engines that does not offer a higher ranking for money.
Try this yourself:
Next time an internet marketing company contacts you, get their website name and then check to see how high they are listed in a search engine by searching for (include the quotes) “internet marketing”.
As of today: 8,420,000 pages.
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