Ranking, ranking, ranking. These words are the 'holies of all holies' among web designers. Obtaining a high ranking among the top search engines has always been the main goal of a well-written ecommerce site. For without a high ranking, there is probably no reason to even have a website.

Most top search engines, such as MSN, Yahoo, and AltaVista are relatively easy to get listed on. Engines such as Google and their dependency search engines are becoming more and more difficult. However, not all is lost. If you can achieve a reasonably high rank in Google, their dependency engines will follow suit.

Below is a checklist of things I have done to insure high rankings, some of which many of us already know but many not do. The best part is that all of these steps can be achieved with nothing but your time.

1. Insure that your Meta description and keywords tags coincide with your site content. Insure that your keywords percentage is around 15% or more of your pages content.

2. Utilize as many page links as possible. Make sure to include outbound and inbound links.

3. Fresh content is paramount. Update your pages as often as possible.

4. Employ images which require the least amount of memory. These are usually in the .gif format. However, sometimes the .jpg format is smaller. So, compare them both.

5. Place all of your JavaScript at the end of your pages or, better yet, create an external .js file and link your pages to it. This will help the spider index your pages, increase your keyword percentage, and help load your pages more quickly.

6. Submit a sitemap.xml file to Google Sitemaps. This will aid in your site being listed on Google. However, be patient, it will take a few weeks to see the difference.

7. It is Imperative that your robots.txt file is correct. Without this, some engines will not even attempt to spider your site.

8. It is also Imperative that your pages are W3C compliant. If they are not, Google will not index your site.

I've attempted to make this as straight forward and simple as I can. Although you can utilize blogs, message boards, RSS feeds and such, they will definitely help but are not required. If you follow all of these steps, you should not only be listed well on Google but your rankings should increase on all search engines, especially the ones that depend on Google for their search engine code like AOL and many more.

About The Author

Daniel G. Osko - Computer systems technician with a degree in electronical engineering.

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