If you want to get high rankings on Google and other search engines, you must do the right things to succeed. You have to work on many different factors to make sure that your website performs better than the sites of your competitors.

Step 1: make your web pages accessible

Search engines must be able to access your web pages. If search engines cannot parse your web pages then they will ignore your site and you won’t get good rankings. Check the following points to make sure that search engines can access your web pages.

• Your web server must not return an error code when search engine spiders visit your web pages. If your server returns an error code, search engines won’t index your site.  Your web server should return a “200 OK” code to search engine spiders.
• You should also check the HTML code of your web pages. While most HTML errors don’t cause problems with search engines, some of them can prevent search engines from indexing your site.   The fewer HTML errors your web pages have, the better.
• The content of your web pages must make sense to search engines. Don’t use images or Flash to present the main content of your web pages.
• Your robots.txt file must allow search engines to index your web pages. If you accidentally blocked all bots or all directories of your website (this can happen with a simply typo in the robots.txt file), search engines won’t list your website.

Step 2: use a meaningful site and information architecture

A good site architecture shows search engines that your website is more than just a collection of random web pages.

Use folders and logical linking to show search engines which pages of your website are related. Search engines should be able to find out that a group of web pages on your site is related to a certain topic.

Step 3: choose your keywords wisely

Choosing the right keywords is one of the most important steps that determines whether your SEO campaign is a success or not.

It’s best to focus on longer keywords for search engine optimization. One word keywords are less likely to convert to a sale and they are also much more competitive.

Step 4: work on your website content

Web sites that only offer articles and affiliate links that can be found on dozens of other web sites will have a hard time to get good search engine rankings.

Try to create unique and trustworthy content that separates your web site from the others.

Write about things you know. If you’re an expert in a special field, write as much as possible about that field to make sure that your web site becomes the best resource for that topic.

Step 5: work on your backlinks

Without good backlinks, it is impossible to get high rankings on major search engines. The links that point to your website have a major impact on the position of your web pages in Google’s search results.

Try to get as many links as possible from related web sites. The more targeted the link, the more it will help your search engine rankings.

Search engine optimization can be tricky because a small error in one element can destroy all of your other efforts.

It is recommended that you work with a search engine optimization company who specializes in Google rankings.

Some days ago, Chitika, a search based online advertising network, published some new numbers about the value of a listing on Google. They analyzed a sample of 8,253,240 impressions across their network in May, 2010.

The first result in Google gets as many visitors as position 2-4 combined

“In order to find out the value of SEO, we looked at a sample of traffic coming into our advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement.

The top spot drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 4 slots combined, and more than the numbers 5 through 20 (the end of page 2) put together.”

Result number 10 gets 143% more clicks than result number 11

“The biggest jump, percentage-wise, is from the top of page 2 to the bottom of page 1. Going from the 11th spot to 10th sees a 143% jump in traffic. However, the base number is very low ? that 143% jump is from 1.11% of all Google traffic to 2.71%.

As you go up the top page, the raw jumps get bigger and bigger, culminating in that desired top position.”

Here are the numbers:

How to judge the financial value of your Google rankings

A number 1 ranking on Google is great but it won’t help your business if it is for the wrong keyword. To judge the value of a keyword, you can do the following:

1. Start a Google AdWords campaign for the keyword, select “exact match” and point the ad to the page on your website that is most relevant to the keyword.
2. Track the impressions and the conversion rate of the ad. To get useful data, you should track at least 500 clicks.
3. With that data, you can make a guess about the value of a visitor that finds your website through that keyword.

For example, your ad might have had 10,000 impressions during a week and 200 visitors have come to your website. Six of them purchased something of your website and the total profit was $500.

That means that the average single visitor who finds your website through that keyword is worth $2.50 to your business ($500 / 200). The 10,000 ad impressions in a week can create a click-through rate of 34.35% (see table above) if you have the number 1 ranking for that keyword.

That means that you would get about 3,435 visitors per week. Based on the average value of $2.50/visitor you would earn $8,587.50 per week or $446,500 per year just with a single keyword.

That is why businesses love search engine optimization.

Being listed on Google’s first result page for the right keywords greatly contributes to the financial success of your business.