How really to improve search engines rank ?

[Dencuga]

People, how can we really improve our page rank for search engines ?
I know that there are key words for the search engines and that there are "robots.txt and Site map" new features in XWD7Premium, but does it really helps and how much increases our page rank ?
What do you suggest ?

[Soquili]

The best way to rank highly by search engines is to have Exceptionally Good Content.

[jon404]

And to get as many links as possible on other web pages that link to your page.

[AutoEvo]

Kaizen.... continuous improvement / updates. I used to do this on my personal website which was called pathfinder-trails.com and ended up higher on natural search listings for a nissan pathfinder than nissan did! Yahoo even did a review of my site. Now though, because I haven't updated it in a couple of years, no web presence in search listings at all. A friend of mine went to a biz functions and spoke with a multi millionare aged 27 whose advice for business was 'don't pay a penny on advertising, spend your time SEO'ing. It's what i've done and i've constantly got a great presence and response'.... wise advice i thought.

[Dencuga]

Thanks for good advices, AutoEvo, I understand what you mean, but what you did at the end ?
What SEO'ing you performed ? I'm asking because I have my site too with low page rank (even if I'm updating it every few days).

[AutoEvo]

it might sound completely nuts with what I typed earlier but i'm only just learning [very rapidly in the last couple of months] about SEO as I couldn't understand why my personal site got such high natural listings where as the professional site i commissioned last year got none at all! Some of the mistakes I made when i commissioned the biz site last year [which I hope i'm correcting over time now i'm doing it myself] are simple things like:
- relevancy of text within the web page for its web title, key words, meta data
- ensuring i have site map on the website
- updating text and information on the website on a regular basis
- evaluating which words are prominant on the web pages of my site vs which aren't and are those prominant words actually relevant [for instance having 'Welcome' as header 1 on a website is useless for SEO but as a SMART repairer, having 'SMART REPAIRS' as Heading 1 would be much more relevant as a prominant heading]
- ensuring text [actual content along with meta data, keywords,] is unique for each page.
- ensuring text is text and not an actual graphic [search engines can't see graphics, they scan text]
- ensuring words are simple [this is true for domains more than anything else] so for instance on my website, auto-evolution, having the domain as auto-evolution is better than having autoevolution as 'autoevolution' does not exist as a word in the english language whereas auto and evolution does.
- making sure my host and its servers are based in the same country as i am [as a uk business it's better for me to have a uk host that has its servers based in the uk rather than in the US - this is also why I have a .co.uk ending rather than a .com ending.
- analysing what key phrases your clients search for on the internet is a great thing to do as well. Do a simple survey of your clients and incorporate their responses in your longtail search phrases... their actual responses might be different to what you think they're searching for.
- the only other thing I can think of off the top of my head is to look at how your website is created... I can't remember exactly [need to check my notes] but google and others can analyse text in CSS but not frames [or they chose not to analyse frames as that's old tech vs. new tech] or it might be tables they can't analyse fully [i forget which one and i'm sure someone on this helpful forum will be able to provide extra guidance than I have here]

anyway I hope the above helps.

[pauland]

- making sure my host and its servers are based in the same country as i am [as a uk business it's better for me to have a uk host that has its servers based in the uk rather than in the US - this is also why I have a .co.uk ending rather than a .com ending.

There is no correlation between .co.uk or .com, etc and the place where the server is and there is no linkage between the domain name and server physical location that is in any way relevant to anything, including SEO.

I have .co.uk and .com domain names and they all sit on the same server, which I suspect may be in Germany rather than the UK.

[added: It does make sense to have a domain name relevant to the country of business, though many people will go looking for .com first regardless of their actual country. Have multiple domains for business use. ]

[AutoEvo]

There is no correlation between .co.uk or .com, etc and the place where the server is and there is no linkage between the domain name and server physical location that is in any way relevant to anything, including SEO.

Each to their own but, as it's been explained to me I would have to disagree. Prominancy and Relevancy are extremely important to SEO. And it's been explained to me that search engines will place greater relevancy and prominancy on local businesses in the country of origin of the search rather than foreign ones and i've been told the same is is true on search engine location. So as natural selection is more important than paid for selection and i've been told that server location and domain name ending assist in this, I am led to believe these two factors are relevant, though once you've got these two items sorted, all the other items will have a much greater impact.

[handrawn]

it's been explained to me that search engines will place greater relevancy and prominancy on local businesses in the country of origin of the search rather than foreign ones

that depends on how you have your search engine preferences set - for example, google will default to prioritising locally [in theory at least], but it can be told to do otherwise

what relevance server or domain locale actually has though, I'm not sure

[AutoEvo]

i see... fair enough. It's all a bit of a black art and i'm told google changes what it sees as being important so often it's like a dog chasing it's own tail... you're constantly going round in circles to get it right