Topping the list in a search engine is the aim of every marketer promoting a website. The way this is done is through a combination of page content and meta-tags, title, description and keywords.

There are some guidelines to help optimise the position of web pages when ranked against search strings by search engines. The Title tag should be between 50-80 characters and the description should be no more that 250. Keywords are not really used by the top search engines, but despite this, don’t repeat words and make them relevant to the page content.

If words used in the search string appear in the page title, description and content, the webpage is more likely to be high in the rankings.

A website needs also to be submitted to search engines to be indexed, but large websites are likely to be found and indexed anyway. Free submit services are available, but submitting manually to Google, Yahoo and MSN via their sites is advised.

Robot and sitemap files should be placed in the root of the website to help search engines index the site and give instructions to spiders, search engine tools used to find sites and index their content.

It is worth putting some time into writing meta-tags to get relevant traffic. Products and services are particularly important to tag accurately to attract new visitors.

It may seem obvious, but adding links from other sites to the website, with reciprocal links is of great benefit, but search engines also view these inter-linkages positively when ranking pages.

A website which is seen to be dynamic, ever changing with new content when visited by respective search engine spiders will also bring an organisation’s web page closer to the tops of the rankings. Blogs and free continually changing content from RSS feeds is great for this and requires very little corporate time.