This is a slightly modified copy of an email I sent to a client earlier today. Someone may find it interesting…..

We deal with a number of clients, and most (if not all) of them are aware of the benefits of being listed in search engines, and having a good ranking (especially in major search engines such as Google). The fact that you have a good ranking in Ask Jeeves is a positive start, as it is a major search engine on a par with the likes of Yahoo and AOL. The main two drawbacks which may be preventing you from being listed in other search engines are the following:

1) There are hundreds of other companies offering a very similar service to your company, which means that you are dealing with a very large amount of competition for that ‘top spot’. Obviously, the more companies there are offering a similar product, the better optimised your website must be to achieve a good listing.

2) From looking through your website, I can see that there are a number of ‘position-boosting’ measures which are not in place. If these are introduced, although a place in the top 10 of Google is by no means guaranteed, it is a much more achievable goal. I’ll try to talk you through a few of these features, which may help to increase your position:

Meta Tags
Meta tags, although a fairly old fashioned method of search engine optimisation, are still used by several search engines when ’spidering’ your website. They are fairly simple to put in place, and could help your ranking a great deal. I don’t know whether you have any web designing experience, or whether you have the ability to manage the code of your website yourself, but here is an example of what should be placed between the head tags in the HTML source of each page on your website. Please note that this works best if you customise the keywords to be different for each page of your website. You should insert:

meta name="description" content="A short description of the services you offer"
meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, etc"

Interspersed Keywords
These should be used throughout each page of your website. When you look at the front page of your website, you can see that there is not a great deal of textual information. There are numerous keywords apparent, however the majority of them are shown on your website as an image rather than as text (such as ‘Training for Success etc). The text shown as an image is generally an important header or title. Almost all search engines are unable to read the content of an image, and thus cannot store your website based on the words shown in the image. What you should try to do is to pack as many important keywords related to your product into the main body text of your website. You should also ask your website design company to add a feature called ‘alt text’ to each of the images on your website. This is very simple to do, and it basically places a plain text alternative to each image on your website. The text can be read by the search engine, and it does not affect the way the image looks on your website. I am quite surprised alt text has not already been put in place (as it is common practice when designing a website).

Dmoz
Dmoz is one of the largest website directories on the internet. It powers Google’s directory feature, Yahoo and many other major search engines. If you can get your business listed on Dmoz, then you are guaranteed to appear in the directory of Google, Yahoo etc. This is a major advantage, and it also can affect your listing on the main search feature as well. In order to become listed on the directory, you simply need to navigate around on their website until you can find the category which you feel is most suited. You then click on the ’suggest URL’ link at the top of the page, and fill in the following form.

Those are the main three things I can see that should largely improve your search engine ranking. There are other fine tweaks etc, however these have a much more minimal impact on your rank. One of the main things which affects where you appear in Google is the number of clicks you have from Google to your website. This is obviously a catch 22 scenario, as if you are ranked higher, you will receive more visitors. However, there are ways around this problem (Dmoz for example). Obviously, there are also paid ways to increase your ranking, and Google offer some excellent options. For more information, feel free to drop me a line.