5 Basic Rules of Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is crucial for anyone who wants people to visit his or her Web site. You can place as many ads as you like, but most people are still going to find your site because of its listings in search engines or directories.

It's a fact that most people who use search engines only look at the first one or two page of search listings. The goal of effective search engine optimization is to get your pages listed on those critical first pages for particular key terms.

1) Remember that each page of your site is a separate entity.
You need to apply the basics of effective search engine optimization to each individual page.

2) Choose appropriate key words or phrases for each page.
Phrasing matters. Many more people search for the term “effective search engine optimization” than for “effectively optimizing for search engines”. To find out which key words or phrases are more popular than others, you can use a tool such as Overture's and Wordtracker’s Search Term Suggestion Tool

3) Give each page an appropriate title that includes the key word or phrase at least once.
We often see sites that use the name of their business as the title of all their pages. Is every page of their site about their business? Probably. But chances are really low that people will be searching for their business’ name!

4) Put the key words or phrase that you've chosen in the page's title tag, meta keywords, and meta description.
Make sure that the meta description is as appealing as possible, because some search engines actually use this description in the search engine results pages that people will be reading.

5) Be sure your chosen key words or phrase is repeated judiciously throughout the content of the page.

You don't want to overdo it, or your page may be rejected as spam, but you need to repeat it enough times that the search engine's software will consider the phrase relevant.

Following are the main areas of web page that search engines give more importance in their ranking algorithms:

Title tag, The main body text, Meta tags, Link popularity, Domain name, Heading tags, Proximity of Keywords, Bold or Italic texts, Folder or file names, Image alt tags, Title attribute and keyword in the beginning of the sentence.

Based on the importance, we can rank those areas as below:

Title	2.0
Link popularity	2.0
The main body text	1.5
Domain name	1.0
Keyword prominence	1.0
Heading tags	0.5
Proximity of keywords	0.5
Bold or Italic	0.4
Folder or file name	0.3
Meta description	0.3
Alt tag	0.2
Title attribute	0.2
Meta keywords	0.1
Total Score	10