If you are setting up a website, learn how to set up a web page first.  Follow these simple web page rules to improve search engine rankings of your site. You can also follow these techniques if your website is not ranked high in search engines for certain keywords.

Concentrate on the home page of your site and once you learn the techniques, you will be able to apply them to the other pages of your site that will have multiple high ranking pages.

1. Find keywords (or key phrases) relevant to your website

Aren't Google great! They even provide you a completely free and extremely powerful keyword tool.  Just pop over to the Google Keyword tool and you can check the popularity of the keywords you want to use. Avoid highly popular keywords unless you've got deep pockets for a highly skilled optimisation company. Highly popular keywords are one and two-word phrases and are very competitive and the hardest to get ranked for.  best to go for longet 3 and four word keywords with less competition as you stand a much better chance of getting ranked on page 1.

While you are researching your keywords, check your competitors by doing a search in a couple of popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc., using those keywords.

 Keep a record of your competitors' urls and other information because you don't want to waste your time doing the same search again in the near future.

2. Use the keywords you selected and put them into the meta tags of your home page

 Meta tags are located in the head section of a web page. Go to one of your competitor's website and select "View" and then "Source" from your web browser's menu to view the html source of the web page. You will see the meta elements. This is a great way to learn how to set up a web page properly as you're learning from people already successful.

Two important meta tags are keywords and description meta tags. Don't leave them blank. You can list your keywords, separated by comma, in the keywords meta tag. Construct a catchy description using your keywords for the description meta tag. (Don't use hundreds of keywords here, just the main 3-5 which describe your site best).  You'll use your other keywords to create other pages on your site.

3. Use the keywords in your title tag

The text you use in the title tag appears in the title bar of the web browser. The title tag should be less than 64 characters long. Again, the key is to use a meaningful title using the keywords. Don't just make a laundry list of your keywords for the title tag.

The title tag and your meta description may end up in many search engine listings. So, spend sometime to make these two elements interesting, meaningful, and relevant to your site.

4. Use the keywords in top heading (h1) tags of your page

Use one keyword (or a key phrase) for each h1 tag. Use these h1 tags for the headings of your content.

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5. Go bold

In the home page content, use bold, using the strong <strong>keyword phrase</strong> html element, to highlight some of your keywords

6. Add some italics

Italicize <i>keyword phrase</i> some of the keywords in your page.

7. Use the keywords in alt tags of images

You should always use the alt tag for all images.

8. Encourage others to use the keywords for text anchors when they link back to your site

Better yet, publish your own short link text with keyword anchors, bold and italicized key phrases and give it away for link exchanges.

9. If possible, use the keywords in your domain name

Try different arrangements of the keywords to come up with an available domain name that you can register. (This is not really for Search Engine Optimisation purposes, but when people link back to your site they'll often use the domain name, if there's a keyword phrase in it, you won't have to bether so much about number 8 above.)

10. Search engine friendly URLs

If you are using php or asp or any other web programming language for your dynamic website, make your url search engine friendly using url rewrite techniques. Search the phrase "url rewrite" in Google to know more about url rewrite.

Keep in mind these simple rules every time you want to launch a website. Spending a few days up front in the preparation of your site will pay off in the long run with better search engine rankings. Once you know how to set up a web page and get good rankings you can keep duplicating your efforts.  Over time this can turn into a very significant stream of traffic for you.