The Truth About Ranking High In Search Engines
By Tristan Kirkham   ©2004 All Rights Reserved

These days it's hard to find accurate, up-to-date information on how to get ranked high in more than one search engine at a time. Usually the information is either outdated or doesn't apply to more than one search engine, giving way to countless hours spent creating dozens of doorway pages. I'm sure you know just as well as I do how frustrating it is having to create all those doorway pages and waiting a few weeks just to see if your ranking improved. Well, to tackle that problem, I stayed up (too many) late nights doing research and have compiled the most effective methods to get a higher ranking, without cheating! One key to high rankings is getting as many links as you can from as many different places as possible, known by the search engines as "link popularity." The higher your link popularity, the higher your rank in each particular search engine. Before you read any further, forget about using free-for-all links pages as a way of getting tons of links. They won't do you any good because your links will likely only stay on any given FFA page for one hour or less, which won't make any difference. A good place I would recommend to start getting "real" links is from all of the people you know who have their own sites. Chances are you know one or two people, whether they are your friends or family members, who have their own sites. Even if they are selling gardening tools, it's essential to swap links with everyone you know! Next, search for some sites that have content similar to your site, but that aren't in direct competition with you. Contact those Webmasters directly and politely request a link swap, while avoiding sounding like an autoresponder. Generally, a response rate of 20% would be a great achievement, so don't get discouraged if you don't get a whole lot of replies. Other than that, directory listings on sites such as www.links2u.com and even message board posts will help. There are even some sites out there that specialize in producing reciprocal links, such as www.linkstoyou.com and www.links4trade.com. Be creative and think of places to post links that won't be considered spam. Another key method to get higher rankings is the use of subdomains within your site. What is a subdomain, you ask? As an example from my site, I have given my "portfolio" section it's own subdirectory. To get there, you would type http://portfolio.tristanstalents.com. You could say that a subdomain is simply a replacement for the "www" prefix. Normally, a search engine will spider your home page and follow any links on that page, spider them and index them accordingly. In that case, it wouldn't do you any good to submit each directory in your site manually, because the search engine already indexed those directories from the links on your home page. More often than not, manually submitting multiple pages from the same site will be considered spam and will penalize all your rankings. Subdomains simply allow you to submit all your subdirectories separately, because the search engines treat subdomains as unique sites. A great example of how this works is Tripod's free hosting program that uses subdomains such as tristan.tripod.com, for example. Each hosted site has a different ranking in each search engine and is completely unrelated, even though they are all part of the same site, tripod.com. Using subdomains requires a Web host that supports them, so do some comparison shopping and remember that using subdomains increases your chances of a higher ranking and increases your overall exposure. To conclude, I'd like to mention something that I've learned through personal experience about getting higher rankings in the search engines. (No, it has nothing to do with META tags!) Always submit your sites by hand, one at a time to the major search engines. Using mass submitters is certainly convenient, but the fact of the matter is that the search engines know how you submitted your sites and mass submitters could even void your chances of getting listed at all! Good luck, it's a jungle out there!

, creator of www.tristanstalents.com, a Web design business with punch! He has been a freelance Web designer for several years, and has applied his special touch to many projects for his clients

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