Higher Search Engine Rankings in Five Proven Steps

There may be millions of websites on the internet, but getting to the top of the search engines for two or three keywords isn't as difficult as you might think. Remember that even though lots of sites may include the keywords for which you wish to rank highly, the keywords in question do not necessarily represent the primary subject of those sites. For instance, if you are an automobile dealer with a website, assuming the site is well written, you really don't have to worry about competition from the thousands of websites on which someone writes a few sentences or a paragraph about his or her car.

The fact is, not many of the webmasters who seek rankings for the same keywords you've chosen will be formidable competition either. Most don't know enough, and many others will think there job is complete after a few months of promotion. It's not.

Are you motivated enough to spend a few hours a week working on your search engine rankings for the life of your website? If so, you have a good chance of being a big winner in the search engine ranking games. Below are the five activities in which you need to be engaged.

1. Be sure you have good meta tags. There are lots of websites which will give you the basics of writing good meta tags and even create them for you; just do a search to find them. Remember that your top keyword or two should be in your title tag, and that you choose the keywords in your keyword tag carefully. Your description meta tag should give potential visitors a reason to want to come to your site.

2. Subscribe to a few website promotion newsletters. You'll learn a lot that will help you. My favorite newsletter is the LED Digest http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/52/77/. Don't forget to read the archives.

3. Find a prominent place on your website to add social bookmarking icons that will enable your visitors to quickly and easily help promote it. Among the sites that will generate code for the icons is http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php.

4. Write articles and submit them to article submission websites. You can submit your articles individually or use a submission software tool or service. By including an author's box with your website URL at the end of your articles (like the author's box below, every page) every webmaster that adds your article to his or her site will link to you, helping to improve your search engine rankings (especially on Google).

5. Spend at least 3-5 hours a week on a linking campaign. First, submit your site to the major search engines and to the directories with a Google PR of at least 4. Then, identify and request links from the most popular sites related to the subject of your website. Of course, your direct competitors won't link to you, but if you find out who links to them, those webmasters may be happy to link to your site too. You'll find a great tool to see who links to your top competitors (and other great tools) at http://www.webuildpages.com/tools/default.htm.

Of course, there are other ways to promote your site...social media, press releases, etc. Try them out too. But, by following through on the five items above, and staying with it, you can move your website to a search engine position which will generate the traffic you need to enjoy success.