5. Relevant Content Make sure that you provide only relevant information to what your actually offering or selling. If you have a bunch of unrelated info on a wide range of topics than search engines will have a harder time pinpointing exactly what it is your site is about. So if your selling golf stuff stick to golf content, don't throw in articles or links about scuba diving.

6. PageRank This is still a relatively new term and applies to an algorithm that google's search engine uses. Other search engines use similar strategies to google's PageRank also.

Basically PageRank is used to define how popular your website is. The more relevant inbound links you have coming into your website higher your PageRank will be. Google also has a toolbar that you can download for free that will show you a site's PageRank. The best way to go about getting inbound links is to find related websites with a PageRank of 5 or higher. Then asking them to include a link to your site (giving them proper code to paste in).

Another way you can receive a higher PageRank is to have a ton of content on many different pages and then linking all pages together in a way that will raise your PageRank. With that said this type of strategy will not boost your PageRank tremendously, so if your site doesn't contain thousands of pages don't stress over it. It is important though to link strategically with keywords between pages of your site.

You can download google's toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com/

7.

**More Places for Keywords**

There are other places that search engine spiders look for keywords besides your website copy. If at all possible try to get a domain name with one of your keywords in it. For instance if you sell dog collars, a name you might want for your website would be www.dogcollarsales.com or something like that. It might take some thinking and some time to come up with a related name that someone hasn’t already taken, but it can be done.

Another good place for keywords is in your page title. Instead of putting name of your business which most people won’t know, instead place a keyword rich sentence or phrase. Using dog collar business example again here is a title page you could use.

Dog Collars – We sell dog collars and other products for your beloved pet.

It clearly tells search engines what page is about. Remember that title of your website is indexed by search engines and is part of what is shown to someone who is searching on that keyword.

So if I typed in dog collars into my search engine, title from above and my meta tag description would show in my search results. Make sure you put some thought into your title.

This rule also applies to your meta tag description which is also viewed when a search engine pulls up your site. Make it only one or two keyword rich sentences. The meta tag keyword has less impact today then it did a few years ago, but I still recommend adding a few keywords. Don’t go overboard and write out 50 keywords or your site will be considered spam to search engines.

Most websites that are designed today rely heavily on graphical content and not much else. Another tip on keyword placement is to try to place a keyword rich sentence near very top of your page. Some people have spots for banners and such at top of their pages, this is same kind of idea and can be made to look pretty and not out of place. This is important because search engine robots start at top of your page and work down. The closer to top of page you have keywords more search engines will think your page is relevant.

**A Frontpage Trick**

Search engine spiders will look at a block of text and if any words or phrases are typed in an H1 size then they consider that phrase to be of utmost importance to page. This is a great place to have a keyword look very important to search engines.

Now for those of you who don’t know, an H1 size is pretty big and would definitely stand out on your page and can oftentimes look a little ugly. There are ways around this if you know CSS well, but if you are designing your site yourself and have no clue what CSS even is then I can help you.

*This tip is only for those of you who are using Frontpage as your web editor.*

You can show search engines that text is in an H1 size, but then change size of text back down to whatever size you want instead. Here’s how you do it.

In Frontpage select text you want to use and set it to an H1 size. Then go over to font size drop down and change it to whatever size you want to use. It’s that easy.

Now one drawback to using this technique is that there will be empty space around phrase that is designated as an H1 size. Basically it is still taking up same amount of room it normally would, it just doesn’t look so blatantly obvious. This technique is best used for titles of paragraphs or break points in paragraphs, so that it won’t look weird to your visitors.

**The ALT Tag**

This design tip is a pretty clever way to get an extra keyword or two into your site. The ALT tag is an HTML tag that is used when you want to give a written description for a graphic element on page. It was designed initially so that if someone couldn’t download your pictures, they could see an alternative description in text describing picture.

Instead of describing picture you can place a keyword in alt tag instead. Here’s an example of what HTML code would look like.

img border="0" src="myimage.jpg" width="640" height="150" alt="keyword phrase"

These are just a few proven techniques when designing your site to improve your search engine ranking.

Leah West