The six main search engine criteria are:

WEB PAGE TITLE

The title is extremely important. Located in your web page header, the purpose of your title tag is to clearly communicate the content of the page to the user. Since users most likely view your page out of context, you should try to provide context-rich titles.

Although it is tempting to stuff your titles with keywords for the purpose of having your page rank higher in search engines results, it is a mistake that will most likely backfire. Consider this title: “Bonsais – Bonsai Trees – Bonsais Specialist – Maple Tree – Bonsai Tree Sale”. This title doesn’t tell much about the page and it looks more like keywords stuffing than anything else. The author clearly tries to speak to search engines and not to users. Now consider this: “Buy Red Maple Bonsai Tree in Tallahassee, Florida”. In this case, aside from being more meaningful, It makes more sense to a user. Which is what matters because you want users who land on your website find what they are looking for, in this case, a red maple bonsai tree around the location of Tallahassee. Users on the internet don’t want to waste their time, and if they don’t find what they are looking for on your page, they will leave in frustration and never come back.

All your pages should have a unique title to help users differentiate them in their browser tabs and favorites. If you want to add your website name to each title, do it at the end of the title, preferably clearly separated by a – (hyphen) or | (pipe).

So if you decide to do only one thing to optimize your pages, it should be adding to each of them a meaningful title. That’s without a doubt the most important thing to optimize your website.

WEBSITE CONTENT TEXT

The first and last sentence of a web page hold a big attraction to many search engines. You should place a single sentence chocked full of key words as the introduction to each web page. The text within your page is also very important. Some search engines rate a page according to the percentages of a key word or words appearing in the text. This percentage varies from search engine to search engine. In doing so, try focusing on some keywords combination instead of single keywords. “Red Maple Bonsai Tree” will help your page rank better than “Bonsai Tree”. It is usually better to have many pages that treat part of a topic than a large page where tons of information is stuffed.

It is vital that your first page not be only graphics. Search engines read graphics poorly, or in most cases not at all. In addition, sites created using frames confuse many search engines. Often they will read the wrong frame on a page giving a low ranking to that page.

Good content means good ranking. I your page contains meaningful text and useful information for your visitors, it will be linked to more often from other websites – see incoming links below – which in turn will improve its ranking.

HIDDEN DESCRIPTION

Not visible on screen is a coded description of your site inside a “meta tag”. This is a single full sentence that describes your page that some search engines display in search results. It is important to carefully add one to each pages of your website because, aside of being displayed in search results, it can raise the density of some of your keywords for the search engines that take that into account.

HIDDEN KEY WORDS

Not visible on the screen is a list of key words associated with your site inside a “meta tag”. Some search engines will note more words in this coded section. The more words used, the lower some search engines will rate any single word. The trick is making sure specific pages on your site are densely clustered around single concepts requiring relatively few keywords to get across your message. You should devote your index page (home page) to communicating the big picture.

INCOMING LINKS

Search engines will rate you higher if many websites link toward your website. Although keep in mind that not all links are created equal. An incoming from a highly ranked website will have much more weight than a link from a poorly ranked website. It may actually penalize you to have incoming links from sites that are “link farms” or blacklisted by Search engines.

DOMAIN NAME

The letters that follow your www are highly regarded by some search engines. If you are not depending on advertising or promotion for most of your business, then consider embedding your product or service within your domain name. Those words most often used to find your site in a word search are the words you need to consider inside your domain name. But in doing so, try to keep it as simple as possible by not using more than 2 or 3 words and avoiding hyphens. The trick is to find something easy to remember and meaningful to both search engines and humans. Of course these days finding a good domain name that is available is difficult. You may want to consider spending a few more bucks and purchase an already registered domain. True, it will cost you more than the $8 you’d spend for an available domain, but this would be a one time cost, since the renewal would be dirt cheap in the future.

Other variables that matters in Search Engines ranking

How your pages are linked inside your website, how many levels there are to your site, whether your site is backend generated or static in nature, what the url page names are and many other variables influence a sites ability to get high rankings.

In the end, if you publish good content that people will want to read and you follow basic search engine optimization procedures, you should obtain a decent ranking in a matter of weeks.