In order to be appropriately listed by the search engines, all of your web pages should be optimised to the best of your ability.

The keywords that you decide to use will be used throughout the entire optimisation process, so it is crucial that you choose the right keywords. If you choose the wrong keywords your website will not be found by the search engines. This article offers you some tips and is aimed to help you make the right choices. When selecting your keywords, you should refer back to this article, until it becomes second nature for you.

I strongly recommend that you think about specific keyword phrases and not single keywords or general phrases. This is because there is so much competition for general terms. If your keyword phrases are too 'general', you do not stand much chance of ranking well with the search engines. The big secret of optimising keywords is to choose specific key phrases, that don't have too much competition.

So what should your 'key phrases' consist of? You should be targeting phrases that you believe people will use in their searches. Ask friends or family members what they would type into the search engines, if they were searching for a site like yours. Remember, if your website sells household accessories and is called householdaccessories.com (as an example), nobody is going to type a search phrase of 'householdaccessories' into Google. But they may type phrases such as, 'shower curtain rings' or 'radiator covers' etc.

Look at your competition and if you have the knowledge, view the html source code for examples keywords and descriptions (also known as meta-data or meta-tags) used by the competing websites. To access the source code of a web page, using Internet Explorer, from the menu, select 'View' then 'Source' and a notepad document will open, showing you the html source code. You can do the same with other browsers and to access the source code in Mozilla Firefox - for example, you simply select 'View' then 'Page Source' from the menu. Don't be intimidated by the appearance of the html code. You are only really interested in the 'Meta Data', near the top of the code and terms such as 'Keywords' and 'Description', should be quite easy to find.

Things to Avoid

1. Dead Links - Before you submit your site to the search engines, check that you don't have any broken or dead links throughout your website. These are links that result in the dreaded 404 Page Cannot Be Found error. Search engines do not like dead links, so they should be avoided at all costs.
2. Overuse of Images - Images are not picked up by the search engines, so use only appropriate images and don't overdo it. Also, ALL of your images should have 'Alternative Text' (also known as ALT Text) attached to them.
3. Avoid Frames - When you build your website, you should really try to avoid using frames, as they are not search engine friendly.
4. Over-Submitting Your Site - If you submit your website's URL to the search engines too often, there is the strong likelihood that your site will become classed as spam by the search engines and you won't get ranked at all. It would be best to wait for at least six weeks, before re-submitting your website to the search engines.

Manually Checking Your Ranking

The first thing that you should do to check that you have been ranked correctly, is to enter your actual URL. If it shows up near or at the top, you can be certain that your site has been approved and listed. This can take a little while and it does differ from one search-engine to the next, but it is possible that your site will appear in a matter of hours.

The next check is to see how your keywords have ranked. To do this, you need to search for your keywords - one at a time - and then browse the search results, until you find your site. Don't be too disheartened if you find your website on page 27, as it can take a while to get your u’re online though, you want to see how you’re ranked in each keyword. To do that, you can simply enter each keyword that you have used, into the search engine and browse the pages until you find your listing. This works, but as you can imagine, it can take quite a while.

To improve your ranking per keyword, you need to improve your page ranking by employing the tactics which I covered in This Article. Do remember however, that you are competing for a good ranking position, with those websites which are using the same keywords and phrases, which is why I recommend that you check out the competition in the first place.