By Meaghan Lewis

So we get a lot of questions here at Three Duck about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). And while getting a number one placement in he top search engines can be difficult, it's not impossible. Here are some tips for optimizing your web site to place better in the search engines.

Search engine friendly pages help you achieve high ranking in the search results. If your pages are search engine friendly, then you will be placed at the top of search results for your optimized keywords. These tips will certianly help you achieve high ranking by optimizing and creating new pages.

1. Before creating any page, you must know for which specific keywords are you creating / optimizing for your page. Concentrate on those specific keywords, use them throughout the web page. Don't flood your page with those keywords, search engine robots are clever enough to spot spam, and if you will use those keywords a lot of times in a page, spam flag will be triggered, which may hurt your current ranking. A good rule of thumb is for every 200 words have your keywords mentioned at least once.

2. Start your page title with that specific keyword, for example you are concentrating on a keyword "graphic design", then use this keyword in the title. Don't use more than 5 words in the <title> tag. Use three important meta tags in each page i.e. title, description and keyword. People will often say meta information isn't relevant anymore, but just because Google doesn't place as high an importance elements, that doesn't mean all the other search engines operate the same way. And while Google is an important search engine, it's not the only one. I use about 7 different search engines when I am looking up information on the internet, because Google doesn't always have what I am looking for.

3. The first paragraph is very crucial and important, the search engines (robots) usually pick the first 30-40 words for analysis and ranking, although it doesn't mean that only first paragraph is important. You should use your specific keywords throughout the page.

4. Use your keyword in headline <h1> tag. There have been a lot of discussion on the headline tags, most of the experts believe headline "<h1>" and bold text "<b>" is given extra weight. Do not use <h1> tag so often, use it only 2-3 times in one page, you can easily change the style of <h1> tag using css. For example

h1 { font-family: tahoma, helvetica; font-size: 12px; color: #000000;}       (click here to go to page 2)