Ten Steps to Achieving Search Engine Success

Ensure that you code is clean

We are not talking washing machines and liquid here, but that your code is well-written. What you are trying to do, is to make the job as easy as possible for search engines to find the key words on your page. The best way to do this, is not to use programs such as Frontpage or Microsoft Word to develop your websites, but ideally to write the code yourself by hand.

Increase your Page-Rank

Although this is a term which is closely associated with Google, the concept can be applied throughout the other search engines as well. The basic idea, is to have as many other sites linking to your site as possible. This in turn tells the search engine that your site is �important� to the web-community. Your Page-Rank can be seen by downloading the Google Toolbar and seeing what your rank is.

Lots of search engines will find your site by the link that they find within certain hand-made directories. For example many sites use the directory results which they find from the open-directory, dmoz.org .

Don�t try and cheat

The more intelligent search engines know all of the tricks that you may use to increase your ranking among the directories. Putting irrelevant text in the same color as the background may increase the number of words which you want search engines to find, but in reality, you will be penalized for it.

Use tags effectively

When deciding what words your site is relevant for, search engines will look at the words and context on your site. For example, if they see that within the title, h1 and the p tags that you talk about Italian Cookery, then they will conclude that Italian Cookery is probably relevant to your page. It is important to use as many tags as possible to display the key words to your page.

There are times when you need to tell the search engines that you exist. On most search engines there is an option to submit your site. It is however more effective to have links in to your site from other sites as they will find you this way anyway.

Create feeder text

Nowadays as search engines are becoming more and more intelligent, they look at the context of key words both on your page and also on pages that are linking in to your pages. Therefore an idea may be to have pages on your site which put the relevant key words into context and also to supply to sites that may potentially link in to your site the text which you would like them to use.

Be patient

Rome was not built in a day and nor will your search engine propagation. You must be patient as it could be several months before search engines even find your site never mind optimize their listing of you for the key words which you would like them to.

Don�t be cheated

There are many companies which say that they will guarantee you placings within the search engines. There is no such thing as a guarantee as the only people who control the search engines are the search engines themselves who supposedly list your site in an honest way. Although it may speed up the process to pay for a speedy submission in a search engine, in the long term, it will achieve the same effect.

Also, some tactics may be used on your site which will work in the short-term, but as soon as you stop paying, will then be rendered useless

Use Meta-Tags

As time goes on, the major search engines are using these less and less because of the ability of people to cheat the system fairly easy. However, opinion still suggests that they do contribute to a certain amount of search engine success so they should still be used, but not agonised over.