7 Steps to Improve Your Website's Search Ranking

If you have a website—even a modest one—or use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, using the right keywords or keyword phrases is vital to success. Well-chosen keywords give you a better chance of showing up near the top of search results. But not just any results. What you want are the most relevant searches conducted by your best prospects.

Keywords tell the search engine robots what your business is all about. Selecting good ones is harder than you think. The bots aren't really that smart, so you have to be clever in what you feed them. Experts at Network Solutions, a top domain registrar and web hosting firm, compare it to placing "bait" on your site. The bait attracts the search engine "spiders" that crawl billions of website pages and index what they find. Most entrepreneurs use common sense to create keywords. That's fine, since they must appeal to real people as well as search spiders. But many keywords are not common sense, and anything you come up with still must be properly implemented to be effective.

Here are seven steps to improving your keyword power, drawn from experience at Business.com as well as Network Solutions: