The process of getting your site ranked higher in search engine results is known as search engine optimisation (SEO). The most commonly used search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Search engines are the most popular tool on the internet that people use to find the information they require. They are also used by companies to bring in qualified traffic; as a result it is important to know how you can improve your ranking in these search results.
Search engines score web sites on various factors that they consider to be the most important to get the most relevant results to users. These factors can be divided into two categories, on-site and off-site.
On-site factors are concerned with keywords and their placement in the code used to create that page. There are a number of places that are important, the main ones being:
1.Body Text
The body text is what people see when they visit your site. The most important thing to consider when reviewing your content is the visitor. It must be kept relevant and easy to read so as to keep people interested and on your site. However you should also include your keywords within this text there is no hard and fast rule as to how many times it should appear but we would recommend around 5% of your text being your keywords. Remember though this should not be at the expense of your visitor, never stuff keywords in just for search engines.
2. Page Title
Your page title describes the contents of that page in one sentence and will appear at the top of your web browser when you access that page. This will be the first thing a search engines sees of your page and will also be seen by readers so it is important to get it right and if possible include your keywords.
3. Meta Description
The Meta description is a paragraph contained in the code for your web page that describes what that page is about. Currently this text is not used to rank pages in Google however it has another important use that is relevant to search results. When your site shows up on the search results the search engine will show a snippet of text. If your meta description contains your keywords then it is likely this will be used as your snippet and so it is important it is accurate, contains your keywords and is enticing.
4. Headers
Headers appear in the body text of web page and are basically the titles of each individual section. Search engines naturally assume that the text in these headers are more important that the rest of the text and so will give extra weight to them when ranking your page.
Off-site factors are not related to the content of your site, but rather to the overall quality of your site as determined by the search engines rules.
The major off-site factor is Link popularity and everything related to it, such as the following:
Number of incoming links - The number of links you can get from other sites to yours
Anchor text - the text that is used in the link to your website
Quality of the linking sites - The sites that link to you should be reputable and relevant to the content of your site
Directory links and links from Article submission sites and relevant blogs
