10 tips to help you improve your website in search engine rankings

By: Ivonson Kwee
Here are 10 tips to help you improve your website in search engine rankings. You should give priority on the home page of your website and once you apply the techniques to improve search engine rankings, you will be able to apply them to the other pages of your site that will have multiple high ranking pages.

1. Look for keywords (or key phrases) relevant to your website. Use one of the keyword tools available online and check the popularity of the keywords you want to use. Avoid highly competitive keywords (for now). Highly popular keywords are very competitive and the least popular keywords are search engine traffic starved.

Select a dozen keywords and key phrases from the middle of the list and start focusing on improving the search engine rankings of your website for them. This is a very important steps and you should spend at least a couple of hours, if not more, analysing different keywords. While you are analysing your keywords, check your competitors by doing a search in a couple of popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc., using those keywords. Keep a record of your competitors' urls and other information because you don't want to waste your time doing the same search again in the near future.

2. Put the keywords you selected into the meta tags of your home page. Meta tags are situated in the head section of a web page. Go to one of your competitor's website and select View and then Source from your web browser's menu to view the html source of the web page. You will see the meta elements.

The two important meta tags are keywords and description meta tags. Don't leave them blank. You can list your keywords, separated by comma, in the keywords meta tag. Construct a catchy description using your keywords for the description meta tag.

3. Use the keywords in your title tag. This will vastly help improve your website search engine rankings. The text you use in the title tag appears in the title bar of the web browser. The title tag should be not more than 64 characters long. Again, the key is to use a meaningful title using the keywords. Don't just make a laundry list of your keywords for the title tag.

The title tag and your meta description may show up in many search engine listings. So, spend sometime to make these two changes interesting, meaningful, and relevant to your site.

4. Use the keywords in top heading (h1) tags of your page. Put one keyword (or a key phrase) for each h1 tag. Use these h1 tags for the headings of your contents. Again, this is important to boost your website in the search engine rankings.

5. In the home page content, use bold, using the strong html element, to highlight some of your keywords.

6. Italicize some of the keywords in your page.

7. Use the keywords in alt tags of images. It is recommended to always use the alt tag for all images. Just don't try to stuff multiple keywords into your ALT tags as this could be considered search engine spam.
8. Encourage others to use the keywords for text anchors when they link back to your site. Better yet, publish your own short link text with keyword anchors, bold and italicized key phrases and give it away for link exchanges. Getting backlinks are one of the best ways to improve search engine rankings.

9. If possible, use the keywords in your domain name. Try different arrangements of the keywords to come up with an available domain name that you can register.

10. If you are using php or asp or any other web programming language for your dynamic website, make your url search engine friendly using url rewrite techniques. Search the phrase url rewrite in Google to know more about url rewrite.

Keep in mind these simple rules every time you want to launch a website to instantly improve your search engine rankings before you even launch your site. Spending a few days upfront in the preparation of your site will pay off in the long run with better search engine rankings.