Improving Search Engine Ranking

Most engines rank web pages by giving the highest priority to the contents of the TITLE tag. So it whould seem that if your page title exactly matches the search phrase, the chances are you will get a high ranking. Maybe even the #1 slot. But in reality you may not even apear in the first million hits.

SEs tend to ignore the first word in the title, since this is usualy a word such as the, a, an, .. etc. So if your title is "Rolling Stones", you may get a better ranking if your title becomes "The Rolling Stones".

The most important keywords should appear in the title. It should be descriptive and not keyword loaded. The title is often the only clue an engine gives to what a page may contain.
Most engines index only the first 80 characters of the title. And many browsers show even fewer characters.

Text near the top fo the page, especialy if it appears within a <Hn> tag, gets next highest priority. Words that occur frequently are given high weights. But if the words occur too often they get lower weights. Common words like the, a, be, is etc are ignored.

If your page contains words that are uncommon in the search engine's data base your page will be ranked very high with these keyword-searchs.

meta tags can sometimes be used to improve your ranking. But many engines assign them a low priority and a few tend to ignore them completely.
For more information on meta tags click here

Frames Can Kill

Despite major changes to search engine spiders, many still cannot index a framed page properly. The easiest way around this problem is to include a <NOFRAMES> section which many spiders will understand. It's a good idea to include links to other pages within this <NOFRAMES> tag.

Keep an eye on the search engines

Some engines tend to remove links after a certain period of time. Therefore it is important to check the search engines regularly. The search page helps you find the status of your URL's with several engines. You can also use Positionagent and Rank this to find your ranking.

To find links to the URL submisson page of some of the major engines click here