How to Rank Well in the Search Engines

There are many factors to ranking well in the search engines. These include onsite as well as offsite techniques.

Search engines apply various rules and algorithms, that decides how your page will rank compared to all the other pages listed. You definitely want to learn these techniques if you desire to attain greater rankings in the search engines. This is search engine optimization.

Onsite

The most important onsite changes that you can make to improve your rankings include the title tag, keywords or phrases, headers such as the H1 tag, key phrase placement in the content as well as the Meta tags.

One of the most important things to get right is placing your key phrase in the page's title. Place it toward the beginning of the title tag.

Next place your key phrase inside the H1 tag (header) right at the start of your page's content.

Be sure that it shows up in your content mainly toward the beginning, but also throughout your text. Be sure that your content is unique, relevant and informative.

Include your key phrase in "bold" text and other special formatting such as bullets.

Don't over do any of these techniques when you are optimizing, as that would be considered spamming.

Add appropriate alt tags to your images. These should describe the images accurately. This is a simple courtesy to your visitors, and good SEO practice.

Offsite

Some offsite optimization would involve links. The quality, relevance, and quantity does have an influence on your rankings.

There are many ways to get backlinks to your site. You can start a blog, post in forums, place ads, and write informative articles. You can also exchange links with other relevant websites.

Article writing and Blogging, are probably the two best ways to receive relevant, one-way links back to your own website. If you haven't started on this yet, then please do. You will be amazed how easy this can be, and the results are well worth your effort.

Besides articles you could write a press release and submit it to PR websites such as PRWEB.

Submit to directories that are relevant to your website. Be sure to include your key phrase in the anchor text. This makes the backlinks more valuable.

Don't stop there. Post on relevant forums with a link back to your site in your signature. Also visit places like Yahoo's Answers, Blogs, and My Space.

You should now have a good grasp on how to rank well by using search engine optimization. Don't stop here. You need to keep going at your SEO continuously. This will give you leverage over the competition. Keep reading quality articles on SEO and put the information you learn to use.

By: Lambert Klein
Credit:www.superfeature.com