The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. I am telling you that it’s time to face the fact.

A high Search Engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through Search Engines. The idea of optimizing your pages for high Search Engine rankings is to attract targeted customers who will be more than likely to make a purchase to your site.

The higher your page comes up in Search Engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That’s what Search Engine optimization is all about.

For search engine optimization, the first item you should examine is the domain name of on your website. Use your primary keyword as your domain name is the best choice. If the desired domain name is taken, add some prefix or suffix around the keyword. For example, keywordguide.com.

The second thing you have to look at is the title. The title bar is the one at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page.

To increase Search Engine rankings, the words on your homepage’s title bar should include the most important keyword phrase. It’s the best to put the most important keyword phrase at the start of the title.

It is important to avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them within 60 characters. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.

The next item that you’ll need to take a closer look is your website content.

Search Engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than those with just fancy graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords – the words that potential customers will be typing into Search Engines to find your site.

The amount of text is very important to search engines. So, try to have at least 300 words on each page, but if this is not possible due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on Search Engines, quantity and quality of text is essential.

Next we come to what is called META tags. These days, many people still believe that META tags are the key to high Search Engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it’s worth adding them in the event that a Search Engine will use META tags in their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with META tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the “view” button on the browser menu bar, and select “page source.” This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page.

If there are META tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a META tag would read:

META name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2”

META name=”description” content=”Your meta description sentence with primary keyword interagted in”

These may not do much for your Search Engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

When it comes to keyword density, I do not give too much thought about it. To show to search engine crawlers that my content is optimized for specific keyword phrase, I like to put the keyword phrase at the start as well as at the end of the content because crawlers give more credit to the words at at the start and end. (Preferably the desired keyword is put at the start and end of the HTML content but not visual content)

Sprinkling some LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) or related keywords within the content can strengthen the primary keyword in terms of ranking for the primary keyword. Note: For more about LSI keyword, read here.

Integrating primary and LSI keywords randomly into your articles /posts titles (H1/H2/..) can strengthen the primary keyword weigth for higher ranking as well.