Ask Shari anything about search engines and see your answer published in DevWebPro’s weekly SEO Corner column.

Have a question? Ask it here.

Google is by far the most popular search engine available today for both ordinary surfers and webmasters.

Surfers like it because of the highly relevant results it gives, and the speed it gives them at. This is due to its complex text matching algorithm and of course the PagerankT system that this engine uses. More on the PagerankT system later.

Robin will answer any questions related to the search engine marketing industry. If the question is highly technical, or if she doesn’t know the answer, she’ll contact experts in the industry or search engine representatives for the answers.

Are you getting the results you need from your website? Fact: traffic and search engine results are the key to website success.

Everyone agrees that you don’t just need traffic for website success, right? You need “targeted” traffic. The old chestnut of quality over quantity is far truer here more than anywhere else.

Link popularity, the number of incoming links to your website, plays an important part in determining your site’s ranking in a search engine. But, before you rush off to try and get any and all sites to link to you there are a few things to consider, and one of them is that the quality of the links is as important as the quantity.

If you are serious about improving search engine rankings, you need to check the keyword density of your web site. In order to do this you must integrate proper keyword phrases within your meta tags and web copy.

Teoma Ranking Tips
First of all, I will say that the same “optimization” techniques we use for every search engine will apply to Teoma, too. Optimizing each web page for the specific search terms involved is a simple exercise. Beyond that, Teoma presents some interesting challenges and opportunities.

Hi Robin:

What drives visitors to your website and keeps them there? Good content.

Getting listed on the first three pages of search engine listings is a goal for many business web sites. It’s also difficult to achieve, which explains why an entire industry has recently sprung up devoted to improving web site rankings.

If you elect to work on it yourself, there are three main ways to improve your web site’s ranking:

#1 Pay Search Engines Directly Sending $299 to Yahoo for a yearly listing or pay per click at Overture are two common choices. You can read more about these options here: http://www.zmoon.com/search.html.

One of the best ways to build traffic is to improve your search engine rankings. I learned my tricks from one of the best, Robin Nobles, the Director of Training for the The Academy of Web Specialists http://www.academywebspecialists.com/.

When checking your site’s ranking under your preferred keywords in the search engines you’ll save a lot of time if you bookmark the results page of each keyword searched.