Did you ever wonder about making your site more appealing to the Search Engines? Did you get scared off by the high fees that SEO specialists charge for their services? If you answered yes to each of these questions, then I have some good news for you. There are only a few very effective ways to get good search engine rankings. The techniques are not very hard to learn and only really require time and patience on your part. Let’s get started….

Domain Name
The trick here is to register a domain name your customers can remember and the search engines think is relevant. Use words in your domain name that describe your product or service. For example, don’t call your site www.derekspage.com if you sell pink widgets. You would be better off calling your site www.bestpinkwidgets.com.

Title Tag
Search Engines value the contents of the Title Tag when ranking your site for keywords. Put your most important keywords in your title tags, using singular and plural versions of each word. Make your tags different and specific for each page on your site. For example, "Pink Widgets and Pink Widget Support". The Title Tag should be a short logical description of your web page.

Header Tags
The description Meta tag is still used by many (not Google) search engines and is often used for displaying a short description of your website. Use about 20 to 30 words to describe your site and be as comprehensive as possible in the small space allowed. Try using your important keywords within the description tag. The keyword Meta tag is rarely used and should not be considered very important. Just put your important keywords in this space and move on to more important optimization issues.

Image ALT Tags
The ALT tag is used for a very short description of an image or graphic file, and is displayed when your mouse pointer hovers above a graphic. Using your important keywords in the image description has been shown to have a small effect with some search engines.

Keyword density
Different search engines have their own preferences as to how many times a keyword phrase can appear on a given web page in order to demonstrate the importance of that keyword phrase. You should try and make sure that your important keywords have a 5 to 8 percent density in your site. If you keywords have higher than 10 percent density, it may be considered as keyword spamming or stuffing. (This will hurt your search engine rankings dramatically) Use the H1 and H2 heading tags to elevate your important keywords within your site. The keywords contained in these tags are considered slightly more important by search engines.

Inbound Links
Getting inbound links should be considered your most important SEO strategy. Search Engines will rank your site based on the number and quality of inbound links to your site. Links from other highly ranked sites are more valuable and will increase your sites ranking. Contacting other website owners and asking them to exchange links with you is a good strategy. The sites linking to you should not be your competitors, but should be related to your site. For example, a bike repair shop would benefit by exchanging links with a bike trail site. Page Rank is a good indication of how valuable a site would be as a link exchange partner. Yahoo and Google each have a page ranking system. When arranging a link exchange, make sure that your important keywords are included in the anchor text. Search engines use anchor text when they try to figure out the relevance and importance of your web pages.