All of us like our sites to rank high in search engines. However, we also know that without the implementation of proper SEO techniques, it is impossible to rank a website all by itself. Many business owners understand the importance of high rankings on Google, but do not know what procedures to follow to rank a website higher in search engines.

If your website is not ranking high, it may be attributed to many factors. For example, your website may have less content, or less indexable content. The difference between the two is not obvious to many. While a website devoid of content gives search engines no relevancy indicators, a website with flawed accessibility cannot be crawled and indexed. Despite having great website content, this website may not rank at all since search engines cannot see the content it has.

Apart from content, links play an important role in ranking websites higher. If you do not have a high quality strong link profile, your website may not rank high for the keywords that matter to your business. Link Building is by far the most important search engine optimization strategy and the difference between a popular site with high quality backlinks and a site with no links can be the difference between search engine success and failure.

When the rewards are big, the competition turns furious too. Every site tries hard for the coveted top spot on Google, since ranking there means a lot of businesses. This is where a simple link and content strategy fail. This is where advanced SEO tactics like link cementing, co-citations, link blending, semantic internal linking and focused content generation come into play. These strategies are not just fancy names but have a proper execution procedure that benefits the websites which face higher competition, to rank beyond their competitors.

If your website is not ranking where you think it deserves, a comprehensive SEO analysis is needed to understand what needs to be done to make it rank better. Search engine ranking factors can be categorized into 5 main heads:

• Content- Content is king. A website to truly rank to its potential should have a lot of high quality, indexable content. Publishing websites tend to rank well because they have a lot of content that matches the log tail of search. The long tail refers to the longer words that have a clear searcher intention. Rankings also depend on the indexability of this content and the way it is packaged and linked together. Formatting of the title tags, meta description tags, use of keywords in the page copy, linking with proper semantics and many other factors which are tightly woven together.
• Links - The link popularity of a website is the sum total of its links. Not all links are made equal. A link from a trusted college website matters much more than a link from a general website directory which nobody knows of. The age of the links, the anchor text of the link and the nature of the link (followed links vs not followed once) all matter when it comes to the link popularity of a website.
• Usability and Usefulness- If searchers hit the "back" button as soon as they land on your website, it sends a signal to search engines that your website may not be relevant. The traffic that does not stay on your website is your bounce rate (per 100 visits). A higher bounce rate and a lower visitor interaction may mean lower rankings for your website.
• Social- Search engines monitor your content's popularity on social networking sites and who follow your content. If your content is regularly tweeted or retweeted on Twitter or if it gets likes on Facebook, search engines take these as positive signals and rank this content higher in search engines.

Clearly, a comprehensive search engine optimization strategy has many parts to it. A website SEO audit may be needed to figure out the issue and fix it. If you are sure that the problem lies in a particular area, companies offer subject matter specific SEO analysis and reporting. This is helpful when the business has a team of online marketers who need external help in investigating any one part of their SEO strategy.

For businesses that do not have any idea about what is going wrong with their website, a professional SEO expert can perform a complete website audit to diagnose what is wrong with the website. These SEO reports may arm the business with crucial knowledge which may affect the bottom-line.

The author of this article represents a renowned website design company. It is a decade young web 2.0 design and web 2.0 development company offering consistent web development practices and website design services and is known for building strong relationships with its clients and community.