Tips to Better Search Engine Performance

Take a sneak peek at what your competition is doing. Use your browsers "View Source" to look at the HTML code behind the page. You can do keyword searches with several search engines and then look at the source code of those web sites that are listing high on the search result page. You can spot their keywords and description and title information right at the top of the source code.
Make use of tags. Meta tags are HTML words and descriptions that the user does not see, but which many of the search engines use to catalog your web site. Example: and
Try not to repeat phrases or word combinations one right after another.
Try to limit the number of keywords and the length of your description. If you use more than say 30 keywords, put the most important or descriptive ones towards the front of your list. If the search engines "cuts off" your list after a limited number of characters, there's a good chance the most important words will be in the search engine database.
Be sure to use a descriptive tag. Instead of Your Company Name try something like: Your Company Name – detail, like this:

• Eastern Ohio's Best Real Estate Agents Home Page


• Eastern Ohio's Best Real Estate Agents Best Deals

OR

• Quick sales specials – Eastern Ohio's Best Real Estate Agents


• Sales Agents Page – Eastern Ohio's Best Real Estate Agents

Often search engines will look for matches to keyword searches in the title of the home page.
Use tags for photos and graphics. ALT tags are used by browsers to display the name of a graphic as it loads or is used by people using your web site with Auto Load Images option turned off. Remember the Google Images page you search.
Don’t use frames, search engines don’t like them and people with slow connections are annoyed by them. Search engines treat frames as if they are links within your main page. What happens is while your main page will be indexed, the search engine will return later to index your secondary pages as if they were external links. Be sure the main page (index.htm or default.htm) page has some descriptive text between the and tag. This descriptive text should contain the most important keywords.
Check your web site's ranking periodically by several keywords. Also, check to make sure your web site has not be dropped or disqualified. Just go to the different search engines and search by your domain name ( type - +domain.com). If you have been dropped, go back and examine your tags and other information to make sure you are not causing the search engine to not list your site.
Google and search engines that use Google count for over 50% of all searches and they make an amazing effort to get everything listed. Yahoo! is more difficult to get listed in, it is worth the effort. The first thing is finding the appropriate category to be listed under. This may take some time to determine the best categories for your web site. Once you are in a specific category, at the bottom of the page is a "Suggest a Site" link you can use to submit your URL. Yahoo will allow you to be listed in more than one category, but will only let you suggest one extra category at a time.
DO NOT "hide" mass amounts of hidden keywords at the bottom of your document. Search engines will often calculate keywords by how many times they appear on a page and if you have too many repeating words, search engines will penalize you.