Building Search Engine Ranking

When you start a website the first order of business is to start bringing customers (in Internet speak: traffic).

There are a couple of ways that you can start building a steady flow of traffic into your site.

Pay for advertising on the major search engines (called pay per click advertising or PPC)
Build your website so that it is optimized and will naturally ‘float’ to the top of the search

Most websites try for a combo of both. While they are still building the SEO (search engine optimization) they purchase Pay Per Click Ads. They are the little boxes that show up along the side of the search engines, on blogs and websites.

There’s nothing wrong with PPC ads. They are a fast way to build traffic and monitor the results of your keywords.

However, quailifed buyers (the type of traffic we want most) are seven times more likely to buy when they click in from an “organic search” than PPC. Organic search means the results that come up when a person types in their question in the seach engine – the list of websites and blogs that show up naturally.

So, as soon as possible you want to build your web rankings so that your website or blog naturally floats to the first page of the Google, MSN and Yahoo results. Not only will this save you advertising dollars, it will bring in a more highly qualified, ready to buy group of readers.

To rise to the top websites must work on optimizing their blogs or websites.

Here is a quick list of ways to help build your search engine rankings:

Optimize you site. Use title tags, meta tags, H1 & h2 heading tags for your most important keywords
When writing your web page try to use keywords people type in when using the search engines. Try for one keyword per 100 words
Use keyword in your click here or anchor tags – instead of just ‘click here’ type in a keyword pharse something like: how to use eBay Widgets
List your site on the indexing directories, dmoz.org – yahoo.com – google.com – most likely the spiders will pick you up sooner, but getting listed on dmoz.org is considered at bonus to the other indexing sites. A real person looks at your site before it is indexed on dmoz.org
Make sure you keep your website updated with relevant material
Issue press releases with links to your site
Comment and participate with other bloggers, leave your url in your signature line
Use squidoo.com by writing an article with a link to your site
Link exchanges are great, but make sure your partner is not just a ‘link farm’ (someone has a site just for links, with the intent to build SEO)

What are your favorite SEO tips? Please share in the comments.

If you are interested in creating a website to build traffic for, check out how to Make Money Using The eBay Partner Network