Unless your website is in first two or three pages, it is unlikely that you will receive many visitors from search engines.

So what should a webmaster do to give their website best chance of ranking high in search engines?

All search engines work slightly differently and have ever changing algorithms for ranking web pages, but these tips can be applied when planning, developing or marketing a website to help you reach that top page of search engine results.

(1) Choose your keywords carefully

It's extremely important to set aside time to research your keywords. It's best to do this in planning stages, before developing your website, but many of us start a website without knowing a thing about how search engines work, so you may find yourself doing this weeks or months later.

Try to choose phrases that are searched on frequently and if possible have a low number of competing websites.

To get an idea of number of times a keyword is searched for per month, type a keyword into box at

Overture Search Suggestion Tool

This will tell you how many times your keyword was searched on in previous month (based on Overture's partner search engines) and give you a list of similar keywords.

Another useful tool to help you choose your keywords is Word Tracker. This tool will help you choose your keywords and give you a "KEI" for each set of keywords based on popularity of keyword (number of searches) and amount of competition.

You can try this out for free on:

Wordtracker

If you manage to pick your keywords in planning stages you may even be lucky enough to find a domain name that contains your keywords.

(2) Optimise your pages

Once you have decided on your keywords you will need to optimise your pages for those keywords. Here are a few tips.

- Ensure that Title of your page contains your keywords.

- Mention your keywords inside meta tags. Most search engines no longer use meta tags, but some make use of them so it is still worthwhile using these.

- Try to make sure that first occurance of readable text on your page contains your keywords

Use of images in search engine optimization process.

The most important thing to understand about search engines' spiders is that they can only read text. That means that whatever text you have inside image will not be read by any spider. Of course, website without images will be boring to look at but be careful not to put important text inside image. It is relatively easy to surround your body text with images to make it look as if text is part of an image without hurting your search engine ranking chances. Discuss these things with your web designer.

Create meta tags.

Creating meta tags is next step toward successful search engine optimization. Meta tags are designed to give search engine spider in idea about your website before it actually crawls body of page itself. Meta data gives spider title of your page, short description and keywords that are relevant to that page. Notice that word "page" is used here; spiders look at each page of your website separately. Here are some examples and explanations on meta tags:

TITLE - that's title of your page. Do not make it too long and don't try to put too many keywords in it. Never less, you should have 1-2 of your major keywords in title.

DESCRIPTION - that's description of you page. It should be 1-2 sentences and should make sense because search engines like Google use it when displaying your listing, along with title tag.

KEYWORDS - that's keywords that relate to your website. Make sure you put keywords that have been used in body of you page. If you put keywords that are nowhere to be found on your page some search engines might penalize for it and filter out your website.

Use style sheets.

Today using style sheets or CSS is a common practice but you still better make sure your website is using one. Style sheets help you clean up your code and remove font tags that might cause problems with spiders. In past webmasters filled pages with tons of keywords in tiny font size and therefore search engines started to penalize for it. Using CSS ensures that all text is of same size as well as spider is concerned; visually all fonts will look different. Now webmasters are even building whole sites on CSS.

Image alt tags.