Tips to help with search engine placement

When people are searching for your company, they will either type in your company name or they will use a few keywords that are relevant to the company. This information goes into the search engine crawlers and they will scan through millions of web sites and list the most-relevant web sites at the beginning of the results. Everyone wants to be on the first page of listings because most internet users do not browse beyond page one. If you are listed on page 2, potential customers could miss your site. How can you get on page one of the search engine results? Here are some easy tips to follow:

Keywords
Everyone knows that the search engines browse web sites for certain keywords. In order to figure out what keywords you need to use, make a list of all the different keywords your customers could use to find your web site. Try placing yourself in your customer's shoes to think about the different keywords they might be using. One way to build your site traffic is to dedicate certain web pages to the keywords. For example, if your web site is focused on coin collections, you want to have at least one web site that pertains to coin collections. You should also list this information in other areas of the web site as this will help to build your site traffic.

Good keywords should have at least 2-3 words, not just a single word. When you use a single word like "travel" this covers a large variety of information and it will be hard to get the right results you want. Opt for a keyword like "travel to Italy" while this still may be broad, it does narrow down the search results a lot.

Positions
Once you have the keywords, you need to position them. Your target keywords like "special diet dog food" should appear in the top 2-3 paragraphs of your web site. This information should also be found on your title pages. The title tag is the most important place to put your keywords, so you'd better label all of your pages. Good web pages may not be ranked simply because the right keywords were not used in the title pages.

Along with the positions, you need to keep the titles short. Think of easy keywords that people will be able remember and find quickly. One way you can figure out some good titles is to take a look at the newspaper. Read through the headlines and ask yourself how they pertain to the story and why they catch your attention. The title page will appear in the search engine rankings, so you need to work hard to create some good headlines. Avoid using too many words in your title page because this can actually cause your search engine rankings to be worse.

Content
When people go to your web site, are they getting the content they are looking for? Even if your site is listed as number one on the search engine rankings, it may not be the most relevant site out there. If people recognize this, the search engines will soon recognize this and before you know it, you are number 11 on the search engines. The pages need to be relevant to your title. Having a good title won't do you any good if people find that the page is talking about a completely different subject. Instead of using just one keyword in the content, use keyword phrases. For example, let's say you have an entire page dedicated to the new flip-phone created by Motorola. You should include the full name of the phone as one of your keywords instead of using just "Motorola" or "flip-phone".