- Use your keywords throughout text of your page - but be careful not to overdo this. Your page should still be readable by humans!

- Use your keywords between headline tags on your page ("H1" tags or H2/H3 if H1 is too big)

- Occasionally bold or italicise your keywords

- Make sure that links pointing back to each page on your site contain keywords for each page

- Give all your images an "ALT" tag and put your keywords in here too - again, don't overdo this

- Try to put some of your keywords in your outbound links

(3) Start Linking

One of most important criteria in getting a good search engine ranking is number of backlinks you have to your website from related websites.

Type in your chosen keywords to Yahoo or Google and take note of top 3 sites returned to you.

Now go to this Link Popularity Tool and put URLs of top three sites into linking tool, along URL of your own site.

Have a look at difference between your site and top 3 sites and this will give you an idea of how many links you need in order to get a top search engine ranking for these keywords.

The best ways to get links back to your site are:

- By writing articles related to subject of your website and getting them published on internet

- Reciprocal Linking with other related websites

- Posting on newsgroups and forums that allow you to have a signature attached to your posting (with your uRL in it)

- Submitting your site to directories.

Try to make sure that anchor text (clickable text) that links back to your site contains your keywords.

(4) Add Content Regularly

Another thing you may have noticed is that top ranking websites have lots of content.

Regularly updating your website and adding fresh content will also help your site to rank more highly in search engines.

If you don't have time to create your own unique content there are plenty free articles available Just type "Free website content" into Google and you'll have your pick of 18 million results that it returns to you!

To improve your ranking, follow steps 1 and 2 above and repeat steps 3 and 4 regularly.

You can check your progress on Yahoo and Google by using free search engine ranking tools at following sites:

Yahoo Search Rankings Google Rankings

Suzanne Morrison is the webmaster and owner of How to Start an Internet Business. To learn more about how to promote your website visit her Beginner's Guide to Internet Marketing

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H tags.

H tags or headings have been known to increase website ranking for a while now. But is it really so? We have strong reasons to believe that h tags (mostly H1 tag) do not get you better ranking. They are, however, a great way to organize content of your page so it is not very surprising that some webmaster still think they can bring better ranking. Also, using keywords in H tags will increase your keyword density. So by increasing your keyword density and organizing your content, you can actually get better ranking but it is not thanks to h tags. There are a lot of website owners that complain that H tags are difficult to work with. Our advice to this is: "Don't use them if you have no place to put them or if you don't have much content to organize." There are plenty of high ranking websites that don't use H tags at all.

Your website's navigation.

Make sure it's crawlable. People often build a website but soon realize that search engine spider does not go any farther then index page. Even though you have links to most of your pages from home page spiders might still have difficulty indexing your pages. There are several reasons why this happens:

Your website is using JavaScript navigation menu. If you have drop down menus in your navigation then it is surely designed in JavaScript. JavaScript is not crawlable by search engine spiders, therefore spider cannot index your other pages. There are several ways to fix this problem. Try adding simple text links to your major pages at bottom of your home page so that spider can move through your website easier. Another way to solve problem is to create a site map and connect it to your home page with text link. This will drastically improve spider's ability to spider your website. Your website is using Flash navigation menu. While images can at least be linked to other pages, Flash navigation is not crawlable at all. Use same solutions that were mentioned in number one. Check your meta tags. It is possible that you are using robots tag which might be blocking spider. Make sure that if you have one either remove it (you don't really need it, spiders will still index and then follow to other pages on your website) or put INDEX, FOLLOW inside tag. It should look like this:

Site Map.

Site map is a very useful thing for an website. It can benefit your website in several ways. First, it will make your website much easier to index; as a general rule search engine spiders index pages much faster when you have a site map. Site map is absolutely necessary if your website is using JavaScript or Flash navigation and you don't want to get rid of it.

Site map will also help your visitors navigate your website. Some of pages they might be looking for a berried deep in your navigation structure and site map makes them much more accessible for everyone.

In you site map you should simply place text links to all of your pages; you can organize them however you want, even group them if you like. In link anchor text use keywords that are relative to that page, it will help spiders identify them correctly.