In today’s world of the web the search engine is king, and getting a highly ranked page is worth more than it’s weight in gold.

There are hundreds of paid services that promise top rankings for your site, but with a little knowledge and basic web page design you can put your site in the upper rankings on most search engines.

In the past the focus was on the “keywords” meta tag that goes in the header of your html page. However, since many people abuse this tag and put an excess amount of repetitive and non relevant keywords in their tags most search engines ignore this feature. It is still a good idea to use it. However it is best used in a discreet and totally relevant manner.

The 2 most important features of your web page are the URL and the TITLE tag. These are heavily weighted for relevance by the search engines. For example, when searching for “used cars” the top two sites on google are autotrader.com and usedcars.com. Autotrader’s TITLE tag has more relevance, in addition autotrader.com has more back links or inbound links from other websites. More on this later.

Your URL should reflect the name of your business or site, or type of business, service or content on your site. The key is to keep the URL relevant to what you are doing.

The other most important thing to do is to customize the TITLE tag of your html to reflect the content on your page or the message you want to convey. Again, it needs to be relevant to the content on the same page. Many novice website completely overlook the TITLE tag and miss out on higher rankings simply because they do not include a relevant description of the page in the TITLE header tag. Why is the TITLE tag so significant? Because the title of the page is what shows up on the searches from every search engine when you do a search. In the example above Autotrader.com’s website title is “Used Cars, New Cars, Buy a Car, Sell Your Car - AutoTrader.com”. If someone had a great used car information site with excellent useful and relevant information and simply titled the page “Welcome to My Website”, chances are this page would not show up at all in the searches or would rank very low.

The next most important thing is to have relevant content on your page, stay away from non relevant personal info on the first page or front page (the index.htm page) of your website. Keep that information for the “bio” or “about” or “personal” section of your site. A great example of a local business that has a highly ranked site for relevant information and business is marlowmusic.com. Marlow Music.com is a musical instrument repair company located in Cheyenne Wyoming. Most of Marlow Music’s business is from local clientele. They are the #1 ranked site for many musical instrument repair categories in their area. For example, if you needed flute repair in the Cheyenne area you would probably type in “flute repair cheyenne” at Google. Marlow Music comes up in the top 5 for this search (currently #1 on Google as of this writing as well as #2 on Yahoo, and #1 on MSN). Upon closer look at Marlow Music’s site you’ll see a relevant TITLE tag, a relevant URL, short and concise relevant content describing who they are, what they do, and where they are located. Since their location is a vital part of gaining customers in their area, their location and services offered are included on the page. The interesting thing to note about Marlow Music’s site is that there is NO Keywords tag and NO Description meta tag included in the header. With a properly designed and relevant site, the search engines do a fairly good job of matching site content to relevant searches. Marlowmusic.com was designed simply to get business for the company the site was deliberately designed in a simple and straightforward manner to get search results and get customers to inquire about Marlow Music’s services. How do we know this? The Author of this article consulted and designed the site for Marlow Music and is an experienced website design and search engine consultant.

Another important consideration is to have an excellent reputation and good PR (“Personal” Relations) and have as many “back links” or inbound links to your webpage from other websites. The more the better. This is an ongoing process and should be part of your overall web presence strategy. Exchanging links with other relevant sites or colleagues is a good practice.
In summary, in order to boost your web page rankings in the search engines you’ll need 4 vital things on your site:

1. A relevant URL
2. A relevant TITLE in the TITLE tag your page’s header
3. Concise relevant content that is simple, straightforward and easy to understand
4. Inbound links from other sites

Out of these four items #2 and #3 are the most important, and #2 is the easiest to implement immediately.

Good luck on your search engine ranking!