There are many factors that you have to look at in the optimization of your web pages and your site to rank high in the search engines. I have made a list and hope that it helps you in your quest to reach the top in Google, Yahoo or MSN. This list is just the things that you have control over when you create your site and try to have a relevent page for a search engine to read.

Page Titles: The title of your page should be the keyword that you are optimizing for. Do not use your site name as the important thing that you want to get across as the words that you want to rank high with. Do you really want to rank for Joes Web Site? Probably not.

Header Tag: The header tag is the bold headline of your page itself. If you want to rank high for say Dog Food, then Have the words Dog Food together in the headline and make sure that the headline is in Header, h1 tags.

Body Text: body text is the paragraphs of info that you have on your page. If your page again is about dog food then it should not be to hard to put the word dog food into the body a few times. Dont overdo this as the engines will realize that you are trying to trick them and can ban your page completely. Make sure that your copy is long enough so that the text does make sense and still has this term in it as well as any variations that you would like as well. It is important to remember that this content is the most important thing in ranking high as more people are apt to bookmark and revisit or tell their friends about the site if you have great original content.

Meta tags: Meta tags are in the head of the html document. These tags will have a description of your site as well as keywords related to your page. This is not nearly as important as it once was as the major search engines do not look at these tags anymore

There are also a few things that you can do to raise the rating of your page in any search engine by things that are not on the page:

Domain name: Pick a domain name that has your keywords in it and try not to use to many hyphens. The domain www.dog-food-foryour-dog.com is not nearly as good as www.dogfood.com although the latter is likely taken.

Page Name: The name of each page is important such as dog-food.htm is better than using df.htm. The page name is more descriptive and makes more sense and so it is more useful to a search angine to figure out what your page is about.