You have chosen a beautiful background graphic or colour for your pages and your images are crystal clear and produced by world renowned photographers. The effect is stunning. This is how your page looks to the visitor:

And this is how it looks to the search engine:

Search engines are blind. They cannot evaluate visual effects for themselves. In the early stages of search engine ranking, search engines have no idea whether your Web site is visually attractive or not. Only when your Web site starts to receive significant traffic from the search engine, can search engines learn whether your pages are attractive to surfers or not. Sites that are visually appealing will enhance their "stickability".

• Graphics should have an alt- tag preferably including the keywords.
Make sure that your  ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.

• A theme that is clear to follow.

• Each page should have a page title with the main keyword(s) for the page included.
Make sure that your TITLE tags   are descriptive and accurate.

• Include keywords in META-description and META-keywords tags.
META-keyword tags were initiated to provide webmasters with an opportunity to advise search engines as to the important content of the page. This tag has been abused by webmasters and it would seem that their value has diminished. Nevertheless, if you use them, do so wisely. 

In an effort to increase ranking and traffic for your song contest Web site, you have included famous singers in your META keywords tag including “Abba” and “Barbara Striesand”.  Neither is mentioned in the text and theoretically, you could be penalised for a form of spamming, although in practice this probably does not occur. Is there anything lost by including these names in your META keyword tags? Probably there is. It works like this. Each page receives from its inception search engine voting rights. The exact formula of ranking algorithms is a closely guarded secret, but let us assume that there are a hundred votes allocated to META keywords. If you have 50 keywords, each will receive two votes. Do you obtain ranking for including “Abba” when they are not mentioned in the text. A ranking checker will demonstrate a negative finding. (I use IBP 9). If we remove 40 of the 50 keywords, the ten that remain will now receive 10 votes each and this will enhance their ranking.

• Have links within your Web site to the main pages.

• Headings and their associated header tags should indicate the important sections of your page. Greatest significance should be given to  <h1> tags. Include your keywords in these tags.
• The pages should be search engine robot friendly.

• An indication of geographical location : If you wish people to come to your site from anywhere around the world, this is not required.

If you have a keword such as "food supplement" then the competition is vast and obtaining top ranking will be extremely difficult. If you  are promoting a food supplement, you will find that there are 6.8 million sites in competition on Google for this keyword. If you search for "food supplement Collier Row" then there are 91.2 thousand competitors and top ranking is more achievable. Furthermore, if surfers come to your site who are outside your catchment's area, they will use bandwidth on your web host's server and this will be an unnecessary expense. I would recommend indicating your geographical location on your front (index) page. One possibility would be "We deliver to Collier Row, Romford and Gant's Hill." There is no harm done including every local suburb. Obviously the same would pertain whatever your profession whether you are a computer engineer, marketer, accountant, lawyer (solicitor), optician, doctor, dentist, psychotherapist, shoe salesman, clock repair expert, estate agent, electrician, or wine merchant.

• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

• Stickability. search engine ranking will improve if search engines observe that surfers enjoy your site. They can measure this by monitoring how long surfers stay with you. There are a number of features that increase stickability:
  • Interactivity preferably with feedback forms for your visitors.
   
  • Provide a "site search" facility". Traditionally, this should be positioned at the top of your page(s) on the right side.
  • Consider introducing an RSS feed on your web pages. This will provide your surfers with the opportunity to see the latest information on the subject of their interest. RSS Feeds change, usually daily, and effectively provide rich new content for your pages. This appears to have a positive effect on page ranking.
  • A Guestbook
  • A Message Board
  • Chat Rooms

In most respects, once a surfer has clicked on a link on a search engine results page, the search engine is blind as to where the surfer goes next. Google seems to have found a way round this by offering a free Google Analytics program. Webmasters, using this program, place a code on each of the pages that they wish to analyse. From the webmaster point of view, Google is providing a phenomenally useful research tool. Of course, there must be a benefit from Google's point of view. With the code on your pages, Google can track where surfers go once they have left the search engine results page. How Google Analytics benefits Google must be a matter of conjecture. Remember, that they are trying to provide the best search option for surfers. It could be that if Google Analytics demonstrates that surfers referred to you are staying on your site are staying on your page or Web site, then this will positively effect your ranking. If, on the other hand, you are providing links to other sites and visitors leave your site and go to these, then Google would assume that your site is not in itself providing the required information and this could have a negative effect on your ranking.

• If you are promoting a keyword for your page, ranking will depend on competition. There are 1.7 million searches for "music" on Overture.com each month and more than a BILLION web pages on the Google database for this keyword. There are millions to be made by selling commodities such as CDs and competition is fierce. Google is currently the most popular of the search engines:



 

• If you choose a less popular topic such as “Schlager Party” success is more likely.  Amazingly, there is still a lot of competition with 1.8 million Web sites that are related to this topic according to Google. However, nobody is searching for “Schlager Party" at the moment Overture.com but it is encouraging to be in pole position. If this music takes off, the Web sites with top ranking could do well.

• You include “music” and “song” in your META keywords. “Song” receives a few rankings but then there are only 12,000 searches each month for this keyword on Overture. You are not ranked anywhere for “music” and this is your sought after keyword that 3could generate vast amounts of traffic. So you want to know why your preferred keyword is not successful. One explanation could32 be that the competition is so much stronger. Sadly, you can do nothing about the competition. But you can resolve to give the competition something to think about. You look at your coding for “song” and “music”. Song appears many times in the text and in the major tags including the title, description and <h1> tags. Your index page must, of course, be dedicated to “Song Contest” as this is the nature of your Web site. But there is nothing to stop you from producing a page where the main targeted keyword is “music”. On this page you can include the keyword in the main tags and as many times as you like in the text. Take a look at the top ranking pages for “music” and see if you can find some further clues on how to obtain high ranking.

• Initially, the search engines can only rank your site according to their on-page and off-page findings. They are not particularly fussed as to whether your site is ranked 100, 1,000 or 1,000,000. It has been estimated that 7% of surfers will click on the first ranked site in the search page result compared to 0.35% for the Web site in position number 10. Few searchers delve beyond the first three or four pages  of search results and page ten will not receive many visitors or "clicks" on advertisements.

• search engines are, however, more than interested in the Web sites at the top of their rankings. Here they can assess “stickability”. If a surfer clicks on a Web site and returns rapidly to the search engine seeking another site then the search engine assumes that the first Web site did not have the required information, or functioned poorly perhaps due to slow download time. The search engine will record this negatively. On the other hand, if a surfer goes to a site and does not return, returns after a significant time delay or comes back and starts a totally new search, then the search engine assumes that the web site provided the required information and records this positively. In essence, top ranked sites rise or fall according to assessment by surfers.