The Cold Hard Facts...

One of the most important factors in being successful in your business is to learn how to rank high in the search engines. It has been said that the search engines can account for as much as 95% of all the traffic to your website! If you fail to take advantage of the major engines you could be neglecting almost ALL of your targeted traffic!

I don't know of any business that can afford to throw away that many visitors.

Is your site ready?

There are many factors in which to consider before submitting your website. Have you prepared your
website for maximum placement? Each page will need to be submitted separately, and each page will
need the following.

* Page Title
* Meta Tags
* Keywords in Header tags
* ALT Tags on all images
* Keyword- filled content
* Keywords as close to the top of each page as possible
* Keywords in links to other pages
* Keywords in outbound links

[Page Title]

It is crucial to place keywords as close to the beginning of your page title as possible. The search engines will typically display your page title as part of the description that shows up when your website is displayed in search results. Placing keywords towards the top of your page can be extremely beneficial. For example, my website page title is, Affiliate Programs Directory@Smokesoft Inc. This means my website will do well in searches on "affiliate", "affiliate programs" and "affiliate programs directory". Try to create your page title in such a way that you can include as many keywords as possible.

[Meta Tags]

Although the importance of meta tags is fading each day, they are easy to create and for some search engines they are a factor, so you would be wise to include them in your pages. For the search engines that do not take meta tags into consideration they will merely ignore them.

[Keywords in Header tags]

This means to create a separate heading for each page containing the keywords you are targeting for that specific page. For example, the heading for my home page is as follows:

<h1>Affiliate Programs Directory</h1>

Meaning that on my webpage it would appear as:

Affiliate Programs Directory

This will greatly increase your positioning in the rankings. take care to prepare EVERY page with this in mind.

[ALT tags on all images]

Another worthwhile little 'trick' is to add the ALT attribute to every image on every page of your website. You can effectively place a keyword in each image on your website!

Follow this example:

<img src="/images/randomimage.gif" alt="yourkeywordhere">

Some search engines will use the text in images when considering keyword relevancy, therefore adding more content in your favor.

[Keyword-filled content]

There is no excuse for not filling your web pages with quality keyword-filled content this is a major factor in how well you will rank in the search engines. The more keywords the search engines locate the higher your site will rank...period.

I've found that one of the best ways to accomplish this is with articles such as this one. Imagine for a moment that I used "search engines" or "keywords" as two of my keywords for a given page, now skim through this article and see how many times these two words appear. As you can see this would be a huge asset in determining how well my site places, and this is just one article! If you are incapable of writing your own articles there are many places where you can obtain articles to place on your site from another author.

[Keywords as close to the top of each page as possible]

This is one of the easiest and most effective ways to increase placement. On each page make sure that the first visible text is a keyword, the search engines LOVE this! If you do not have keywords placed as the first visible text on your page, you may want to consider modifying or redesigning it to allow for this. It is well worth the time and effort and you will most likely see almost immediate improvement in your
search engine rankings.

[Keywords in links to other pages]

You should try to insert keywords into your links whenever possible. For instance, if you are targeting the keyword "marketing" on a particular page, create a link to a page on your site and call the page "marketing tactics". The page the link leads to could consist of articles you have written on marketing tips you have discovered. Not only will search engines use the text in a given link to determine what your page is about, but they will also use it in determining the subject of the destination page. If you really
want to take it to the next level, try using a keyword filled link as the first visible text on your page. This too will skyrocket your rankings in the search engines.

[Keywords in outbound links]

This concept is identical to that of linking to other pages except you instead will be linking to another site. For example if I were linking to another affiliate promotion site I would place the keyword "affiliate program" somewhere in the link. This is a must! My advice to you is to save this article and refer to each and every step when you setup a webpage. This is by no means all there is to know about search engines however, if you follow these guidelines you will do extremely well.

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Adam Buhler is the author of the Affiliate Secrets Newsletter: http://www.smokesoft.net/newsletter.html
For information on how to land your site near the top of the search engines visit: http://www.smokesoft.net/top5ranking.html