In the competitive world of today, internet is flooded with millions of new websites every day. When you search for a certain keyword in any search engine, you will receive huge number of results which keeps on changing on a regular basis. If you want your Website to be displayed in search engine results for a keyword, there comes the need for Search Engine optimization (SEO). SEO is basically the process of optimizing a website to rank higher in the results of search engines. Search engines rank a Website based on various criteria like relevance of its content, age of the Website, popularity and trust. For your Website to rank higher in such a tough competition it is necessary to have all the qualities which search engines look for.

SEO refers to the techniques that are used to fine tune a website in such a way that the Website rank good in search engine results. The first and major step in this process is to increase the relevance of your content and make it keyword rich along with increasing the relevance of the design of the Website. SEO practices used are to make sure that you are taking all the required steps to improve the overall effect of the Website by talking care of Website’s content, design, look, popularity, usage , relevance and last but not the least the traffic of the Website.

There are several points you should take care of while performing SEO on the Websites. Some of the important points are listed as given below:

1. Optimize the Website:
First of all, you need to start by optimizing the pages of your Website. It includes making sure that your page have the correct tags, right keywords and relevant content. You should always include the main keyword in the META title. It is always a good idea to enter some details for Meta keywords and Meta description. A maximum of 3 keywords should be present per page. If your Web page contains more than one keyword or key phrase, you can separate them by using the Alt tags.

2. Include H1 Tags in your page:
Once you have included the Meta title and keywords, your next step is to make it easier for search engine crawlers to read the keywords present in your page as well as title. This can be done by including

tag. To do this, you need to open the source code and include

tags around title of the page which is present in the content.

3. Use of Site Maps:
Creating a sitemap for you Website will make the job of search engines a lot easier and they can easily read the content on your site, thus helping your Website to rank better. Creating a site map is very easy and there are many free tutorials available explaining the ways to do that.

4. Create robots.txt file:
After you are done with Meta tags, keywords, h1 and site maps, the next thing you need to do is to create a robots.txt file for the site. It is like giving instructions to search engine spiders about how to index you website content. It is used by search engine like Google to index the content. It makes the task of search engine easier and helps you having an edge over the sites without a robots.txt page.

5. Link Building:
The final and a very important step in optimizing your Website for SEO , link building. Link building helps you increase your rankings in search engines as well as your overall page rank (PR). When linking to various sites, you should request that the link should use you targeted keywords as anchor text. Google page rank is a very important part of link building as page rank has been invented by Google. Some ways of getting backlinks are article submission, directory submission, forums, comments on blog and social networking sites.

If all the above mentioned practices are followed with proper expertise, the websites will begin ranking high in search engines. You can keep a track on your Website status by using tools like Google analytics. However, you should remember that there is no shortcut to success in SEO. You should not fall trap in illegal SEO practices like black hat. Such practices show immediate results but can prove really disastrous for your Website image in long term. The best way is to follow all the given techniques and wait for your hard work to be fruitful