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Everyone wants their web site to stand out in a Google search. After all, Google logs millions of requests every day, and its technology is being used by more and more high-profile search engines (like Yahoo). Being in the top 10 results on Google could mean a lot more traffic to your site.

One sure way of rising to the top of the pile is to actually shell out some dough to the good folks at Google. This technique is called search engine placement, and it can get you the preferential treatment you want. However, there are other FREE alternatives to achieving the same goal, and they all fall under the term search engine optimization (or SEO).

The key to a good search engine optimization campaign is to understand how a search engine thinks. I’m only going to talk about Google because every search engine has a slightly different temperament. Basically, Google’s search engine tries to determine how relevant your particular site is to the search term. It does this by trying to determine how many other sites have linked back to you, and by comparing your site’s metadata to the search term, and finally, by comparing your site’s metadata with your web copy.

Although that all sounds pretty complicated, it really isn’t. Here are a few steps to increase your Google rankings (please note that these techniques can take weeks and months to take effect):

1. Keep your metadata tight and to the point. Keep your HTML titles down to 10 or 12 words. Don’t use more than 8 or 10 descriptive keywords. Why is this? Because too many keywords will in effect lower your ranking–this is because the algorithm won’t believe (if I can humanize it a bit) that your web page can actually be about so many topics.

2. Align your content with your metadata. Make sure that you repeat your keywords in your headers (particularly your first H1 tag), in the first paragraph of body copy, and link text. Also, you can place your keywords inside HTML comments and in the ALT attributes of images (yes, I know, these are normally used to aid the blind, but hey, we need search engine visibility here!). Doing these things will help convince the algorithm that your page has been rightly described.

3. Get others to link to you. The more sites that link to you, the better off you’ll be. Don’t limit yourself to simple link exchanges, either. Whenever you write an article for an online zine or publication, make sure that your bio contains a link back to your site. Always have your URL in your sig when you post to online forums.

Over time, these efforts will raise your visibility. Good luck!

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