How to rank high in Search Engines

Every day I get a lot of messages and emails from friends asking my suggestions on ranking high in search engines. Rather than explaining the same thing again & again I thought lets post it here so that next time when someone asks me the question, I can simply guide them to this link.

Whenever we talk of search engines; we talk about Google, MSN & Yahoo. Following some basic search engine optimization tricks can get you on top in all the 3 search engines but there are some things which one of them likes and the other dosent. Below are the points which I feel would help you rank high for a keyword:

1. Get good quality relevant backlinks. Two backlinks from a PR 5 websites is alot better than 10 from PR0 or 2.
2. Use the keyword in the domain name. For e.g If your keyword is ‘SEO’ then try to find a domain that has seo in it.
3. If you have multiple keywords try to get a domain with keywords separated by a hyphen (-). E.g. For keywords ‘Seo Contest’ a domain like seo-contest.com would be great.
4. Make sure you link the keyword to your site. For E.g In a forum signature dont just put www.yoursite.com. Use < *a href="http://www.yoursite.com">Your Keyword< */a*>
5. Use your keywords in the title, meta description and keyword tags.
6. Try to keep your page as small as possible in size.
7. Submit your site to as many directories as you can.
8. Use your keyword in the alt tag for your site’s banner.
9. Never leave any of the images on your site without an alt tag. Try to use your keywords in alt tags, avoid irrelevant use of alt tags.
10. Use your keywords in H1 tags wherever possible.
11. Try to make your page W3C complaint.
12. Avoid using alot of flash in your pages.
13. Make sure the important (keyword rich) part of your page loads first.
14. Use a browser like lynx to see how your site is seen by a search engine bot.
15. Make your keywords bold and itallics wherever possible.
16. Try to add content to your sites. Search engines are always hungry for fresh content.
17. If you want to target a specific country audience then use that country’s domain extension. For. E.g A site targetted to Indians would rank high for people searching from India if it has a .in or .co.in extension.
18. If you have a news/articles site, make sure your article title is your browser’s title as well.
19. Never use programs to auto-submit sites to directories.
20. Avoid linking to irrelevant and low PR sites.
21. Avoid selling and buying of links (This is what Google says and noone follows)
22. Make sure your page has atleast 3 internal & 2 or more external links and all links have a title tag as well.