7 Steps to High Search Engine Placement

Higher the ranking your site can have in the search engines, higher is the rate of success of your website.

High rankings on the search engines is very important because recent surveys have shown that 80% and above of new visitors to any site, reach there because of search engine query.

Hence we can deduce that for visitors to reach your site, you need to have high search engine ranking. Given below are a few steps to improve your ranking on search engines and optimizing the placement of your site:

1. Design for Specific Search Engines -While designing your website, aim to get a high ranking in the top three search engines- Yahoo, Google and MSN. So knowing the criteria on which these search engines rank site is very important.

Given below are the current tips to get good placements for your sites on the three big search engines:

2. You should know your target audience. You should know the kind of keywords that your target audience will use for searching content that is available on your website. This can be found out by doing some basic research on the internet.

The keywords may not be your site name, but some way related to the site and the content offered therein. Audience will have some questions, whose solution they will be looking for. As a site owner you will need to know the questions whose answers your target audience will be looking for.

3. Meta tags should be used. Meta tags are commands you can place in the html code on your web page. It is on the basis of the Meta tags in your HTML code, that the search engines categorize your website into different categories. Two important Meta tags are:

-Keywords Meta tags

-Description Meta tags

The keyword meta tag includes the keywords from the page and the description meta tag should give a description of what is there on the page. The words used here have to be direct, to the point and without fluff. If the search engine does not find the keywords in the Meta keyword line, then some search engines may not list the site.

To get a better exposure and placement on the search engine, make sure you have a different Meta description tag on every page and remember that the keywords given in the keyword tags have been used in the page content.

4. The Title tag should be made optimum: HTML title tag on your website has a lot of importance and is given high weightage by the search engines.

Title meta tag is the first element to be scanned by the search engines, therefore the presence of a title is a must. The title should be catchy, should have the keywords that your target audience will be searching for.

To get a better placement the title tag should match the headline text and different pages of the site should have a different title tags, because pages that have the same title tag will be ignored by the search engine.

5. Page Headlines should have Keywords. Page headlines are important for the search engines as well as for the visitors. Page headlines should contain short and crisp keywords and phrases and avoid generic words and fluff.

To get a better ranking use strong page headlines and repeat the same headline in the title tag as well.

6. Text should be keyword rich and interesting. To rank websites and pages the search engines actually count all the words on a webpage, and then rank these words by frequency of use on a particular page.

More a word or phrase has been used on a page, higher it will rank on the search engine, so if you are aware of the keywords that your audience will be using to search for content on your page, then use those keywords more frequently on the web pages.

For a better search engine ranking pack your content with keywords, avoid fluff and meaningless words and phrases that may get you penalty from search engine administration.

7. Images should have ALT Tags. Even images on your site should have a tag, as the Search engines are also indexing sites by the images found on the site. The ALT tags on the images are catalogued by the search engines. So while putting the ALT tag also describe the image by using a keyword or phrase.

Making your sites compatible to the various search engines will pay off because search engine rankings is what is going to direct the traffic to your site.

To Your Success!