When people search for something online, they type the keyword or key phrase in the popular search engines, which give them an extensive list of sites relevant to that search. Now to make your website visible in the first set of search results, it needs to have a good page rank. Search engine optimization is the means to this end, the branch of activity which aims at enhancing this rank of a website with some structured strategies. Most owners of sites invest a fortune and valuable time in creating a web presence, but sadly, they fail to consider the more important aspect — that is, how the website will come to the notice of web-users.

Long back it was just a matter of some time to launch a site — design it, fill it up with nice content and submit it into some directories — it was as simple as that! And search engines would also give good ranking to that website for the keywords featuring in the body-text of the webpage.

And since the number of websites present then were not even half as much of what is there now and since the techniques of optimizing a site in search engines were not as improved, keywords could be repeated along with other otherwise refutable maneuvers like creating many domains with the same content. And this too ensured those sites a good position in the popular search engines.

But things have come a long way from that now. There has been a dramatic change in the search engine marketing scenario. Today, just ordinary designing, content and submission won’t help; the website owner needs to do his homework — study the various types of relevant keywords typed in search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN and then fashion his/her website accordingly so that the website ranks well enough to be viewed by the majority of people. And because today people tend to look for everything online and keep searching for the right goods and services till they find it, the search engine optimization is a big challenge, although with some amount of risk involved.
Now web presence is something very important here. If you are stepping into the online scene, your website needs to have a web presence. If not, you have a disfavor. The search engines, particularly Google, do not prefer giving high ranks to new domains. Position improves with time, as the website becomes old.

So obviously, websites which are older in time and already have a secured web presence, stand a better chance of getting higher ranks in the search engine. Listed below are some of the key factors for achieving the top positions in search engines.

• Clean Codes: All search engines prefer a neatly coded website. When a webpage is designed in MS Word, it generates untidy html code. This is not a good thing. Also, website owners need to be careful about the WYSIWYG editors. Some use proprietary tags in the html and thus become uncongenial to the search engines.


• Content: No saying would suffice for the stupendous importance of proper content that helps a website to score high in the search engines. Content is the backbone for any site. Search engines often look for relevant keywords or phrases in the body text of a webpage to identify those with the searched words/phrases. If found, your website is considered relevant for those keywords and you can expect a pretty good rank.


• Tags: Yet another very vital aspect in html coding is the tag—the title tags and meta-description tags. To give your website a decent search engine position, these tags must contain the relevant keywords which you think users will look for.


• Linking: Simply put, linking means other websites linking to your website. Now how would that help, you ask? This is good for your website precisely because the search engines consider each related link on your site as a given “vote”. The logic is easy — if site X links to site Y, it obviously follows that site Y is of some value or worthy of it. These links can either come from important directories like Yahoo! or Dmoz, or from other related websites. For instance, if your website promotes clothes, a link from a fashion house’s website would be relevant and count as a good vote in search engine parameters. However, exchanging links with questionable sites like link farms is not appreciated. Link farms are considered worthless in the sense that these are directories that just collect links without any valuable content in them. So whenever you add links to your website, ensure that those links have your targeted keywords in their anchor text. Post articles or mention elaborately about your product and services is and then include links to your site. There are many important sites which post articles and appreciate sites with good content. So you may also popularize your website by putting up online press releases there. However, it takes a lot of effort, patience, time, skill and money to achieve the desired position in search engines for particular keywords. But when the results start showing, you will know that it is worth the wait.