If your goal is to reach the top of major search engines, like Google,Yahoo & MSN Then you need to focus on both on-page optimization and off-page optimization how’s this done you may ask?

Well the key to this strategy is to first ensure that your web pages are properly coded and secondly that you get as many quality web sites as possible to link back to yours.

1. Begin with properly formatted Meta Tags. There are literally 1000’s of articles on the web telling you of the importance and none importance of Meta Tags to seo. It true that whilst the importance of meta tags may have diminished in the last five years properly formatted tags, including your title tag, description tag, and keywords tag, are still important for classifying your web page and communicating to the major search engines the content of your page. Including how you wish your listing appears in search engine results lists.

2. Focus on keyword density. Most likely you are trying to optimize for a particular keyword or keyword phrase. Keyword density is the concentration (as a percentage) of your keyword phrase on a given web page. Keyword density should range between 2 and 8% as over optimization can damage your results more than no optimization at all. A quick tip determine your keyword density on a given page is to divide the number of times your keyword appears by the total word count of the page.

3. Use proper page formatting. Place an emphasis on your keywords for the search engines to see. You can identify your keywords with specialized tags such as title tags (h1, h2, etc.) and properly formatted text. Be sure to bold, italicize, and underline your keywords at least once on the page you are trying to optimize.

4. Generate links to your web site through article marketing and link building activities. Submit original content to article directories, Press release sites and authoritative sites in order to generate back links. When these web sites links to your site, the search engines take notice - improving your overall search result placements. Build as many back links as you can.

5. Obtain listings in Web directories. Large directories like the Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ and others are extremely important to improving your overall search results. Many web sites use these directories to display web sites when users search on a particular term. If you’re not included in the directory, your web site may never appear as a search result option.

These are the key steps recommended by most experts that you’ll need to undertake to improve the ranking of your site. In upcoming articles we will look at each of these steps more closely as well as software you can use to help you do this.