5 Tips to Rank High on Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing

By Ian Cheow Yu Yuan, December 08 2009

Today, there are millions of websites on the Internet. To get people to notice your website from the crowd, ranking high on search engine result listings is very important. Millions of people use search engines like Google and Yahoo to look for information, products and services every day. If you can get your website visible to your target audience, it will sure boost your bottom line.

In this article, let me share with you 5 sure-fire tips to rank high on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing:

1. Do a keyword research to identify a list of keywords or key phrases that your prospects will use when looking for your products or services. Keyword research is the bedrock of search engine marketing. A good keyword research will save you time and bring more profits to your business.

2. Place your primary keywords at the right places on your website. Your primary keywords should be placed in the Title, Meta Description & Keyword, Alt and H1 to H3 (if applicable) tags of your website. Your keywords should also be included within your content to increase your keyword prominence.

3. Ensures that your website loads fast. Matt Cutt, Head of Google Web Spam team, recently said that Google may consider loading speed as one of the ranking factors in the near future. This means that you now need to make your site loads faster. If your site is heavy on images and flash, try to remove unnecessary flash images to increase loading speed.

4. Do not write content only for the search engines to read. Write naturally to ensure that your content is written for both humans and search engines. At the end of the day, humans are the ones who pay for your products and services. And if your content is stuffed with keywords, search engines will penalize your site and you can forget about achieving high rankings for your website.

5. Build back links consistently. Back links are very important when it comes to SEO. The more back links your website has, the more reputable your site is in the eyes of search engines. When search engines feel that your site is reputable and important, they will reward it with more prominent rankings on their search results listing. Some of the ways to build back links are: article marketing, press release submission, blogging, social book marking, forums, exchanging links with other webmasters and directory submission.