What can you do to affect your search engine ranking?

Once you understand how search engines determine the ranking of sites in their search results, there are some simple steps you can take to affect your site's ranking.

1. Remove all possible barriers to search engine spiders

There are several barriers that can prevent search engine spiders from being able to effectively crawl your website. These include:

• Frames
• Complex coded navigation (Java Script & Flash)
• Dynamically created web pages
• Use of animation and graphics especially in elements important to search engines such as menus, links, headings and important content
• 'Black hat' techniques that search engines deem illegal and will penalise or ban your site as a result

2. Make your site search engine friendly

Your site design, structure and content should be created so that it is "search engine friendly". Therefore your site should:

• Have a clear navigation and text links so that each page is reachable from at least 1 text link
• Make effective use of keywords
• Be rich in clear and accurate textual content
• Make effective use of page markup features such as title tags, alt tags, etc

3. Establish 'back links' to your site

As discussed in "How do search engines place a website in their rankings?" the number and quality of back links to your site has a major impact on your site's search engine rankings. Therefore, a strategy for building these links is a critical to improving search engine rankings.

Some things you can do to improve your search engine ranking include:

• Submission to web directories
• Submissions to topic-relevant forums  
• Submissions of articles to topic-relevant sites 
• Establishing reciprocal links with relevant sites
• Creating "link bait" on your site to encourage other sites to link to yours
• Creating ad hoc or project specific links to your site