When looking into building a website in Las Vegas, or trying to further your website into something a bit more successful, finding ways to improve your search engine rankings is a very important concept. The first thing you should know to fully understand how to improve your search engine rankings is to know exactly what it is and how it is affected positively and negatively.

What are search engine rankings?

Search engine rankings are positive and negative marks given to your website by the search engine providers themselves, like google for example. A search engine ranking will either make your website higher or lower in search engine results pages – the difference from your website appearing on the first page or the hundreth.

What can I do to improve my search engine ranking?

Search engine rankings are influenced by many different concepts, strategies and tactics –  all built into how your website is structured, designed, and advertised, along with how all of the content is relevant into each other in the use of keywords and key phrases.

Some ways in which you can help improve your search engine ranking is to make sure your web address is simple, short, and supported by the most commonly used addresses such as dot com, which is the most popular on the internet today. If you are able to have relevant keywords as part of your title, that can help tremendously as well.

Another way to improve your ranking is to keep all content on your website relevant to either your website service, or the topics which your website focuses around, for example if your web name is dolphin, then dolphin should be a keyword which is used in all of your content to link relevancy of all web pages to your website. Even advertising pages which are not on your website should also still be relevant to the given topic.

When using keywords you need to watch your density of usage, you do not want to use too many or too few. Too many can get your website black listed as spam by a search engine, while too few will make your website hard to find on a search.

The best way to increase your search engine ranking in a short amount of time to gain maximum traffic, would be to invest some money into your website and hire a professional Las Vegas web design company. A professional web design company knows all the tricks to maximizing page ranking and getting your site to the top of the search engine using Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

You may have heard of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), but do you know what it means? Search Engine Marketing is a type of online marketing that helps increase visibility and rankings on major search engines such as google, msn, yahoo, alta vista and others.

Essentially, Search Engine Marketing is a series of strategies and tactics that combines search engine optimization along with paid listings and paid inclusion programs that allow your website to gain visibility on search engines. This increase in visibility online and on the internet, can help your Las Vegas website attract visitors and gain valuable sales leads.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization allows your website to rank when visitors to major search engines such as google, type in a phrase in the search bar and then find a list of results from their directory for that phrase. So, if your Las Vegas website featured your plumbing services and a google search was for “las vegas plumber” your site could come up in the results pages if you had performed search engine optimization services on your website.

For more information on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how you can improve your website’s rankings, see my article on Improving Las Vegas Organic Search Engine Rankings.

Paid Listing, Paid Inclusion

In addition to using Search Engine Optimization to increase your organic search engine results rankings (SERPs), you should implement a paid inclusion or paid listings program through a major search engine such as google. 

With this strategy, you can choose the exact words and phrases you would like your website to appear for during a search, then when that search is performed, your website comes up as a “Featured Listing” or “Sponsored Listing.” You set your own budget. For more information, visit my article “How Can I Utilize Google AdWords to Increase Traffic to my Website?”

Professional SEM & SEO

For professional Las Vegas SEM and SEO services, visit the following:

• Las Vegas Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Services
• Las Vegas Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services
• Las Vegas Blog Marketing

Improving Search Engine Rankings for Your Las Vegas Website

For many, the traffic to and from a website is the most important part of the internet marketing process for your Las Vegas web site. Without visitors and traffic, many sites cannot flourish and the information on them is then meaningless. To increase the number of visitors and traffic to a website, many businesses turn to search engines, hoping that if their site appears more often or closer to the top in a search, that the traffic will increase. 

One way of doing this is referred to as SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. This process attempts to improve visitor rates “naturally” by alter the content and presentation of information on the site itself, hoping to increase how many keywords the site falls under in a search. For example, if a site were to be originally focused on horse breeding, this site would probably only appear in searches for that specific keyword: horse breeding. Applying SEO, the site host would add articles concerning horse breeds, care and up keeping of horses, feed options, etc. All of these all still fall under the category of horse breeding, but the site will now appear in a number of other searches with different keywords separate from just horse breeding. Unfortunately, many sites use SEO to draw people into spam sites, referred to in the industry at “black hat SEO”. These sites attempt to fall into as many keyword categories as possible, so as to appear as options in as many searches as possible and be seen by as many people as possible. While not necessarily illegal, this use of SEO is considered against internet ethics; it is, however, a good way of explaining and understanding the SEO process.

Another option of optimizing the number of visitors to a site is SEM, or search engine marketing. Unlike SEO, SEM does not alter the actually content of the page. Rather, it places paid advertisements for the site on search engines. Put any keyword you can think of into Google Search and hit enter. On the right side of the page at least five little advertisements will appear, each with at least on of the words from your keyword search in it, even if it doesn’t make any sense. This is an application of SEM. By paying Google to host their site as an ad, websites increase their visibility and, hopefully, their visitor rate.

Okay, so your Las Vegas company or business has a website, that’s a great first start. In addition to a professional website design with good content, your website needs to rank or appear in search engine results like google.

Natural organic search engine rankings for your website bring your website listing to the first few pages of a google search. Organic rankings are the ranking google pulls when you do a search. They are not the paid or sponsored listings or links.

Here’s a visual to help (it’s my company Perkolate coming up #1 on a search for “las vegas marketing company”):

So, how can you improve the organic ranking for your website?

• Have a well written website with a decent amount of content, a couple of hundred words on each page if possible.
• Optimize all META tags on your web pages (title tag, keyword tag and description tag)
• Link to other websites, could be partners of your business, helpful links, articles, community links, etc.
• Have links going between your website pages that are rich in keywords and key phrases.
• Purchase your domain name for several years (tells search engines you’ll be around for awhile!)
• Have a professional SEO company in Las Vegas perform Search Engine Optimization services on your website.
• Consider adding a blog to your website (another great way to get more links and traffic to your website).
• Add your website to the google directory (and all other top 10 search engines)
• Keep your website up to date – search engines like fresh content.