Five steps to better search engine performance

1. Keep your site updated with quality content

Update your site frequently, keeping in mind that content that's written well for humans also works well with search engines.

2. Work on your inbound links

Inbound links (or "back links") carry a lot of weight with search engines. Don't get involved in link swapping scams, but consider opportunities for linking to your site from directory sites, or sites belonging to customers, partners or suppliers.

3. Set your <title> tags wisely

The <title> tag for a web page is an important ingredient in the equation. The <title> tag is the text that appears at top of your browser. When you search for a service that you offer, check the titles for the pages that are returned in your search results. You'll usually find your search term.

4. Use friendly page addresses that describe what each page is about

Make sure the page addresses (URLs) contain keywords that are relevant to your content. The indexing algorithms for search engines like Bing and Google give preferential treatment to friendly page addresses and index them against any key.

5. Populate your other "meta tags" and header tags with your keywords

The keywords that describe your page need to appear in:
The page description (Describe the page succinctly in 25 - 30 words.)
the keywords field (This should be a comma separated list of key words and/or phrases)
The header tags within your content (h1, h2, h3 etc.)