Improving search engine placement depends on a variety of factors which, if working together, will produce good results:
1. Improve Web Page Structure
Aim for a well structured and logically designed website. If you have difficulty in locating information so will the search engines.
2. Use Meta Tags
Make good use of the <meta> tags. These are positioned in the <head>...</head> section of the web page and although they are not visible to site visitors they do present useful information to search engines. Perhaps the most important to consider are <meta name="keywords">, <meta name="description"> and <meta name="author">.
3. Use Header Tags
Make proper use of header tags, i.e. <h1>...</h1> for first level headings, <h2>...</h2> for second level headings, etc... Not only will this improve readability but search engines also love a well structured page.
4. Use Relevant Keywords
It's always a good idea to optimise your web page with relevant keywords people have searched for. A few good tools include WordTracker, nichebot.com and Google Suggest, currently found under Google Labs.
Try and place these keywords in your <meta> tags, "alt" attributes in <img> tags, page headings and at the beginning of paragraphs. Also, if you can, place a few of your keywords within your main text between <b>...</b> tags. One thing to avoid though is over cramming as this is considered "spamming". Generally a keyword density of between 2%-5% is good (i.e. 2-5 words out of every 100 is a keyword).
Following a few simple rules and a little bit of patience are often all that is required to improving search engine placement.
5. Encourage Back Linking
A major factor in improving search engine placement revolves around "back linking", the number of links pointing back to your website. The higher this number the more important your site appears to search engines.
There are various artificial means of getting these back links, such as link farms or link exchange schemes, but it's always better to provide good, relevant content that your prospects can use and recommend. The quality of the websites linking back to you will reflect the quality of your own content, and this will in turn help improve search engine placement.
