But remember a good website ranking is virtually FREE advertising and will bring in a steady flow of traffic, so worth going to some lengths to get a good position.

First, sit back for a minute and ask yourself what exactly you are selling. What keywords are people going to search for to find your page? Getting a good ranking on a search engine depends on the keywords you are using - or more specifically the keywords people are using to find you!

Your aim should be to create a few HIGHLY FOCUSSED doorway pages for your site, each one optimized for a particular keyword of phrase. But be honest with yourself. Use keywords or phrases that describe your product or service as closely as possible.

To help you find out which keywords are most searched for, and how likely you are of getting a good ranking, there is a very good tool called WordTracker. It emails you a free weekly report of the top 500 keywords (phrases) that are requested on the major search engines. It also filters out all pornographic words which account for 25% of search engine requests. However it also does more!

You can enter a keyword or phrase that you want people to find your webpage with, and it will return a list of 100 other related keywords. You then click on any of those keywords and you will get a list of how many searches have been made for it in the last 24 hours. Then Wordtracker compares the results with the number of pages ranked on AltaVista for each keyword or phrase and compiles a report for you.

Now here is why this tool is so valuable. You can see which keywords you have more chance with in obtaining a higher search engine ranking - those keywords with a lot of hits but relatively fewer pages listed on AltaVista - and create doorway pages optimized for those keywords. The doorway pages you create will now have a better chance of ranking in the top 20 or 30. Wordtracker has a free trial.

Now after choosing your keywords, create a doorway page for each one.

Most search engines place a high importance on the keywords and description "META" tags on your web pages. For a more detailed explanation of META tags, look at our HTML tutorial at http://www.TheWebsEye.com/HTML.htm.

As well as the meta tags, search engines take into account a number of other considerations such as keywords in the TITLE tag, in your header tags, and how keywords are placed on your pages. If you want to know more about how search engines rank your pages we strongly recommend you download the award winning free e-book "Search Engine Tactics" from our downloads page -
http://www.TheWebsEye.com/downloads.htm (only 129 KB).

The more specific your keyword or phrase, the easier it is to get a high ranking. A page optimized for "Chinese herbal tea" should get a good ranking much more easily than a page optimized for "tea", because there would be a lot fewer sites trying to have well-positioned pages.

What we are saying therefore is that you need to use keywords that directly describe your product or service. If you are paying someone to do it for you, make sure you tell them the exact search phrases you want your site to be found with.

Designing a number of "doorway" pages, each page optimized for a different keyword or phrase, will multiply your traffic. ALSO remember that search engines don't all use the same set of rules (algorithms) to rank your pages. Some might place more emphasis on the META tags while others may spider the content.

You can take your page optimization one step further now, and create a doorway page not only for each keyword, but for each of the major search engines. So it is quite easy to have 30 doorway pages for one product or service - 3 different keywords and 10 search engines. To do this properly involves searching for your keyword on a particular search engine and then analyzing what the top 5 or 10 sites have in common. You can then optimize your own page based on the results of your search. Doing this manually is not time-efficient when you can get software to do it for you.

There are a few good software packages that will spider your web pages, compare them with the top "X" results for a particular search, and then let you know what you should change. They can also monitor, keep track of your positions in the different search engines, and schedule your submissions. Optimizing your pages is still time consuming but if you are prepared to spend an hour a day creating a new doorway page, you will soon be able to create your own "traffic puller" on the web.

You will find details of how to get WordTracker and free trials of Webpage optimizing software at our website - http://www.TheWebsEYE.com/search-engines.htm.

About the Author:
Richard Igoe, - http://www.TheWebsEYE.com -
FOCUSSING on the ESSENTIALS of website design

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