Search Engine Ranking

Top search engine ranking can dramitically increase the amount of web traffic that you receive to your site.  In order to increase conversions as a result of top rankings, you will need to target quality keywords with that has a high conversion ratio.  Once you know which keywords you want to target, then you will need to agressively target those words with both on page content, off page links, and internat theming and navigational structure.

Go after the right words and rank high

There are some keywords or phrases that are just outside of your league.  A common thought of SEO's is that of a neighboorhood.  The basic concept is that you are in the same neighborhood as those sites that link to you and who you link to.  The first step toward achieving higher rankings is to identify which keywords and phrases will have the most return for your time investment.  You will want to try and go after words that with some hard work, you will be able to land your site listed in the top 10 of the results, while still converting a customer.  Research shows that most web searchers don't ever venture past page one of the results. 

When a web searcher does not find what they are looking for right away, most typically narrow their search by enter more keywords into the search query box.  This trend has occured as search engines have filled their indexes with more and more results for each phrase searched on.

Hang out in a good neighborhood and achieve high rankings

Associating your site with a good neighborhood, will help to define to the search engines what your site is about.  You will want to make sure that you link to like sites and like sites also link to you.  If your site is about cars make sure your link partners are quality sites, with content about cars, car parts, and car accessories.

Avoid the bad neighborhood and improve low rankings

Linking to a bad neighborhood can drag your site down in the ranking and even pull it completely out of the top results.  Now, in theory you should never be penalized for any incoming link to your site.  If you could get penalized for having for having a bad site link to you, then your competitors would create many bad sites and link them to you.  You will also not be penalized for anything that is outside of your control, and incoming links are definitely outside of your control.

Now, you may be in trouble if you link back to a site within a bad neighborhood.  Just to be safe, you may want to drop any site that is in question when linking to you.  Going forward, each time you add a link, make sure that the link is relevant to your site, has relevant text or keywords surrounding your link, and make sure that the site is not a link farm.

How you can acheive an increase in your search engine ranking?

The goal of all web masters is to increase search engine ranking of top keywords.  The best way to increase search engine ranking is to increase the incoming links to your web site.  Now this statement does not hold true in all cases because not all keyphrases have the same level of competition.  If you are going after a highly competitive word such as "home mortgage", you are going to need a very high number of incoming links, because your competitors will have them. 

There are many words, and even some that may be your best keywords, that will require significantly fewer incoming links to achieve high rankings.  Achieving top rankings will take a significant amount of work because you will need to increase your incoming links, improve page content, and fix the navigational structure of your web design.