10 Tips on How to Get Higher Search Engine Rankings

1. Create a site that has great content! This is 100% without a doubt the very best thing you can do to get ranked high in the search engines. This is because if your site has great content people are going to link to your site without you having to do a thing.

2. Many search engines give higher weight to a web page if their domain name also contains the keywords.

3. Use descriptive keywords in the of your web page. When visiting a site, a spider will go first to the tag. The tag is what a browser will display in its title bar. The first words of introductory text of your page should be descriptive as well. Pages with keywords appearing in the title are assumed to be more relevant to the topic. If a page has a main graphic at the top, place some descriptive text either underneath or beside the image. The search engines will index this text and assign it a high level of relevancy. Search engines will also check to see if the keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. They assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the beginning.

4. Yahoo: The trick with Yahoo is it's actually a directory rather than a search engine. This means that choosing the proper category is extremely important. Just go to their main page and select a category that you think is the best at describing your site. Then select a sub category and another and another each time trying to select the most appropriate category for your site. When you feel like you get it narrowed down the best, go to the bottom of that page and hit the "suggest a site" link. From there it will walk you through the final 4 steps. Snap - Submit to Snap much as you would to Yahoo and it's just as hard getting in. When submitting to Snap and Yahoo make sure you select the appropriate category and fill out all the information they ask for or you probably won't get listed.

5. Good link popularity can significantly increase traffic to your web site. Well-placed links are a good source of consistent and targeted traffic. Increasing the number of links to your site can actually improve your search engine rankings. So it makes sense to network - Contact other related web sites and exchange links with them. Negotiate reciprocal links with the sites that appear in the top ten lists. Some of these sites might be considered competition but many are happy to link to your site in return for a link back. Another way to get links is to write articles that you freely distribute containing links back to your site. Links remain one of the best ways for people to find your site. Click here to check how your site is doing - Linkpopularity.com. You can check your links on Yahoo by typing in u:www.yourwebsite.com. Also, here is a great resource for getting links back to your website.

6. Consider expanding your text references, where appropriate. For example, a baseball card-collecting page might have references to "collectors" and "collecting." Expanding these references to "baseball card collectors" and "baseball card collecting" reinforces your strategic keywords.

7. Use the plural keyword when possible - If someone searches for "dog" and you use "dogs" as your keyword then your page will be found because dog is part of dogs. Your strategic keywords should always be at least two or more words long - Make sure your strategic keywords appear in the crucial locations on your web pages. Each page in your web site will have different strategic keywords that reflect the page's content.

8. Use ALT tags especially if your site contains multiple photos or graphic-image maps at the top of your web page. Some search engines will take into account the text within an ALT tag when creating your site's description and keywords. In addition, you will be greatly appreciated by all people who visit your site who prefer to view text only. ALT tags are placed after an image file and generally look like the following:

9. Never use any unethical practice to achieve higher search engine rankings such as hiding text in your page.

10. Keyword density - basically, you want your site to have a greater keyword density than your competition's site.