I’ve been getting a lot of questions recently about search engine rankings, and what are the basics of what can be done to help maintain or improve rankings. Since I think I’ve written the same email 3 times over the few weeks, I figured I’d put those thoughts down here. This is just the basics of what you can do to help your rankings, and there are dozens more actions you can take to improve or fine tune your rankings. To those in the know, I realize this isn’t new information, and it’s probably been mentioned in our blog before, but there are still plenty of people who can benefit from learning it.

So first off, something to keep in mind is that search engines, and in most cases we’re talking about Google here, will move you up in their rankings if you have a site that is consistently updated, gets consistent visitors, and is linked to from other sites (there are many other ways to get ranked, but I’m just touching on these). In general, these all feed off of each other. So the more a site gets updated with relevant content, the more visitors it gets, the more it is linked to from other sites, which generates more visitors… As you can see, a consistently updated site is very important when it comes to search engine placement.

So how do you go about this? You include sections on your site like news, events, blogs, etc., anything that requires frequent updating. So it could be a blog where you put in an entry a couple times a week about your latest products, or an instructional entry, or business trends, etc. Basically anything you think your visitors would be interested in reading that has something to do with your business (copying someone else’s article doesn’t count, for both plagiarism and search engines). Then, each time you post a blog entry, go to your Facebook page and let people know about your entry, or tweet about it. Then visitors to your Facebook and/or Twitter page click over to your site to read the blog (linking from other sites, remember?). What you may end up with is not only people visiting your site to get expert information (and hopefully some participation as well), but also prospective clients could potentially see how knowledgeable you are.

The drawback to things like blogs and Facebook/Twitter is that they require constant, consistent updating. You can’t do an entry once every few weeks and expect your visitors/participation/rankings to go up. It’s actual work to keep one of these up. We have one on our site and it can be like pulling teeth getting people to write for it (I think this blog entry is a week late!). However, if you broaden the scope of what you can write about, as long as it has something to do with you or your business, you’ll always have something to say.

One final note, and that’s concerning meta tags. I wouldn’t put too much energy into meta keywords. In fact, Google doesn’t even take them into account in their web search (they do in their site search you plug in to your site, however). I’m not saying ignore them altogether, but pay more attention to the titles and descriptions, and concentrate on incorporating keywords into your content.

We all know that the design of a web site is important. But of all the things design does for a web site, the two most important are to get the user’s attention (closely coupled with not turning them away), and be a vehicle for content.

The first part is obvious. You need to give your visitor something they want to look at, even if they aren’t aware of it. However, I don’t feel this is the most important job of corporate web design. That would be achieving the latter part, as a vehicle for the content.

Let’s face it, most people coming to your site are there to get information. Good design makes it easy for the user to find that information, without being distracting by being overly styled, or overly repulsive. All fairly basic concepts.

However, and there’s always a however, most people don’t realize how important it is to have their content ready before their designer begins working on the look and feel of the site. Content quite often drives design, since shoehorning content in to fit a design generally results in a page that looks like garbage.

So remember, when starting a new site design, or redesign, or whatever you want to call it, do your best to have your content ready at the onset. Your designer, your time frame, and anyone who visits your site will thank you for it.