If you really want to master the net then one thing you will need to do is to implement some simple SEO (Search Engine Optimization) procedures to improve the search engine rankings of your website.

These techniques will also help you if your website is not ranked high in the 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 to develop a site with many high ranking pages.

1. Keywords Find keywords (or key phrases) relevant to your website using either Overture, Wordtracker or Empowerism.com. Overture is free, while Wordtracker and Empowerism are subscription-based services. Wordtracker offers a 7-day free trial which you can take advantage of to check the popularity of the keywords you want to use. On the other hand, Empowerism offers a whole range of Internet marketing and research tools and also a powerful affiliate program. (Click the banner for more info.)

Avoid keywords that are in high demand AND keywords with no demand. Highly popular keywords are very competitive and the least popular keywords receive very little search engine traffic.

Select a dozen keywords and key phrases from the middle of the list. This is a very important exercise and you should spend at least a couple of hours, if not more, researching different keywords. While you are researching your keywords, check your competitors by doing a search on 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. Metatags Although this is no longer as important as it was, it is still a good idea to place the keywords you selected 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.

The two most important meta tags are the "keywords" and "description" 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.

3. Title Tag Include your keywords in your title tag.The text you use in the title tag will appear in the title bar of the web browser. Make sure the title tag is less than 64 characters long, but make sure you construct a meaningful title with the keywords.

The title tag and your meta description may end up in many search engine listings so you need to spend some time making these two elements interesting, meaningful, and relevant to your site.

4. Header Tags Use the keywords in top heading tags of your page. Use one keyword (or a key phrase) for each h1 tag. Use these h1 tags for the headings of your contents.

5. Bold When you write content for your home page, use bold to highlight some of your keywords. The code you need is (strong) (/strong), replacing the round brackets with html square brackets.

6. Italics Italicize some of the keywords in your page.

7. ALT Use the keywords in "alt" tags of images. You should always use the "alt" tag for all images.

8. Keyword Anchors 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. Domain Name If possible, use keywords in your domain name. Try different arrangements of the keywords to come up with an available domain name that you can register.

10. URL Rewrite 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. Do a Google search for "url rewrite" if you need to find out more about how to do it.

Follow these simple steps when building a website. Spending a few days upfront in the preparation of your site will pay off in the long run with better search engine rankings.

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David Hurley writes articles on a variety of subjects. For more information about Internet success strategies, sign up to his free Internet marketing tips newsletter at: http://grasp-the-nettle.com

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

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