Ooh, I completely forgot about this thread...
There are a
lot of ways to improve your search engine rankings (
SEO - Search Engine Optimisation), but basically they fall into "Dishonorable" and "honorable" camps.
"Dishonorable" means are effectively cheats - back ways, trying to manipulate the search engine algorithms artificially, using loopholes etc.
These may well be effective in the short term, but have a few key problems:
- You don't know how well they work, as you don't know exactly how the algorithms work (not surprisingly, Google keep this stuff fairly secret), so you could pay El Dodgy SEO Comapny a shedload of cash for mediocre results.
- Artificial ways may be targetted to one particular search engine
- The actual site itself can become harder to use and to update because you're warping it.
- If the algorithm changes (typically to close these loopholes), you're stuffed.
"Honorable" ways can be summarized as, simply, Do It Right.
Follow standard HTML and accessibility guidelines, ensure your content refers to your busines in plain and clear ways, use standard navigation links so that search engines can understand it (i.e. not Flash), follow usability guidelines (look at
www.useit.com for a starting point), put in lots of links to other sites, try to get lots of links to your site, keep your content fresh and interesting, and so on.
There's a lot more to it, of course, but
SEO is a field of snake-oil merchants.. As a rule, if you have a good, usable, interesting website, which is updated frequently, then you should have lots of visitors and links - so your rankings will rise.
Hope that helps - hey, 8 months too late, but I got there in the end
