Have you created a web site and submitted it to search engines only to find that no matter what you do, your site still does not feature in the rankings. Are you interested in better search engine rankings? Here are 8 things you can do to improve your rankings and these need to be done before you even submit your site to be indexed.

1. Web site Content:

Web site Content is one of the most important factors that will decide the rankings for you. The site pages should provide valuable information on specific subjects rather than providing directory of all free articles found on the web. When a search engine is used to find information, generic terms are rarely used. Rather search engines are used to find specific terms or phrases that describe the product or service people are searching for. One of the important things that your website should have is the niche keywords sprinkled in to the content thus making your pages more relevant to the search engines.

If niche keywords are located in a web page that is carefully constructed to highlight keywords known to produce traffic, the chances that your site will appear in a search result for a very specific search improves. It's also important to understand that the search engines cannot be tricked by flooding the engines with multiple versions of the same page, repeating the same term over and over - these tactics will only make sure your web site stays out of search engines reach.

2. Link / Web site popularity:

This is one of the most important factors that you should consider for achieving good rankings. Most of the search engines today treat link popularity as one of the factors that determine your ranks in the search engine results. The number of websites that link to your website determine your relevancy for a search term. The link popularity or the incoming links does not necessarily mean that you should be submitting your web site all possible FFA link sites / directories or even classified ad directories.

The best way to get links to your web site would be to type in the search terms that you are targeting in your favorite search engines. You should visit the sites returned by your search engine and look carefully for adding links or exchanging links. Most of the web sites today provide an link exchange option. using Google toolbar to see the page rank for these web sites will be helpful since exchanging links with web sites with Page Rank 5 and above is definitely going to improve your chances of getting your site indexed.

The next important things that should be considered when optimizing your web site are the Off-page and the on-page elements. some of the on page elements are Title Tag, META Tags, Heading, ALT Tag and highlighting of the text using BOLD tag. The Link tag i.e. the A Tag is considered as an important off page element.

3. Meta Tags:

Meta-Tags are the HTML tags that will be used to describe the web page. You need to put the important keywords for your web page as well as the brief description of your web page in these tags. Though these tags are not directly visible to the users, they serve an important purpose of guiding the search engines through your page. Although the importance of META TAGS has reduced significantly today, they still help the search engines to decide on the relevancy of your page with the search keyword.

The META Keywords should contain important keywords and phrases you are targeting for your web site. They should be consistent with the HTML Body Text and Page Title. You must make sure you are not stuffing the META tag with keywords which would annoy the search engines. Ideally the META keyword tag should contain 100-150 characters. Being specific and accurate is the mantra to success with keywords.

The META Description tag will contain a brief description about your web site, services provided by you. The description you put in the META description tag should be relevant to the content on the page where this tag is located. i.e. You should not be talking about your product in these tags when the page contains some article on unrelated topic. The description you provide for your page has to convince the person that you are providing exactly what want. How would you feel to visit a page with stuffed keywords but no relevancy to the content.

4. TITLE Tags:

Ideally the title tags should contain 50-80 characters with your important keywords embedded in them and more importantly should be relevant to the content in the page. if multiple keywords are to be used in the Title tags they can be separated using a | (Pipe), though it must be seen that keywords are not stuffed in the Title Tag. Moreover the keywords in the title tags should be readable and should describe the content of the page.

5. Heading Tags:

The Heading tags are given more weightage than the ordinary text. The higher the H tag the more weightage it carries. You need to make use of the Heading tags to highlight the important keywords in the paragraph headers. These keywords should be used to describe the contents of the paragraphs on your page. this will ensure that you are not stuffing the page with keywords but they are a part of the flow on the page.

6. Bold text

The important keywords in your page should be put in the bold tags. Normally the bold text has more weightage than ordinary text. Even Though the bold tags are considered to be less important than the Heading tags, they are still important to be ignored. Make sure to enclose the search term in bold tags when it appears on the page.

7.Alt text

The Alt tags are normally used by the browsers if they are unable to load the images. Some of the users might have disabled downloading graphics on their browsers, or if the images are too heavy to download for the users internet connection. Having your important keywords to describe the images will help you get the important keywords on the page, As much as possible try to include the search term in the alt text of all images on the page. Beware, naming all your images like spacers, irrelevant images with the keywords might be a shortcut to get yourself banned with the search engines.

8. Off-page elements:

Link text - This is considered as an important factor in good rankings. The link text might have been placed on your own sites or other web sites linking your site. Either way, it is important. Ideally the link text should contain an important keyword describing the target page. Make sure you do not use identical link text for every link. The text links will have even more weightage if the text around them is related with the target page's topic and search keywords.

If the website is optimized for the above points, it definitely will help you get a better search engine rankings.

Are you interested in better search engine rankings? Here are 8 things you can do to improve your rankings and these need to be done before you even submit your site to be indexed.