SEO techniques are effective procedures to put a website on the first page of search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN for your targeted keywords. These techniques directly help in raising the SERPs (search engine result positions) of the site, increase site traffic and acquire relevant quality links.

If you want people to find your site via a search engine easily, the site will require a high SERP. This means when users search on specific keywords or phrases, they will find your site on the first page generated by the engine. Having the site on the 10th page of search engine results will not give you satisfactory traffic and you can potentially lose thousands of customers and sales.

Let's discuss the techniques that can help you towards achieving a high SERP

1. Domain & File Names

Select a domain name of your site that contains words from your main keyword phrase/query. The domain name should also be easy to spell and easy to remember. Ideally it should only contain alpha-numeric characters and no hyphens for optimum results.

2. Easy to think Keywords:

Such keywords are to be used which are searched for in excess on the net. Add keyword synonyms to your content. Make sure you use your keywords from the page you are linking to.

3. Density of placing Keywords:

Keyword density is related to the number of times the keyword appears in the text on a particular page. High keywords density is considered spamming by the search engine and can get your site blacklisted. Your keywords should be toward the top of your page and in either every paragraph or every second paragraph depending on your paragraph length.

4. Misuse of SEO Techniques:

Misuse of search engine optimization techniques may get your site blacklisted from a search engine. Some techniques that are considered spam are cloaking, invisible text, tiny text, identical pages, doorway pages, refresh tags, link farms, filling comment tags with keyword phrases only, keyword phrases in the author tag, keyword density too high, mirror pages and mirror sites etc. These are all termed as Black Hat SEO techniques. While these techniques might work to give you a higher ranking for a short time, however in the long run they will slow down your progress and can have detrimental and very damaging consequences.

5. Construction of Titles and Description:

Each page should have a different title with two or three of your keyword at the beginning. When search engine results are displayed the title is the first thing people observe and therefore enough time should be spent on constructing a fully optimized and well thought title. Your description should also have at least two or three of your keywords at the beginning as so should your first sentence on the page. There should be a different title, description and first sentence on each page.

6. Authors Biography:

At the end of the page place an author biography or company name. This technique will help you to improve the branding of your site and get good rankings for your company name.

7. Website Design:

In what way the website is designed is also important. Text content should balance the HTML text. The pages of the site should validate and be accessible in all browsers and from anywhere.

8. Links on the Site:

There should always a navigation menu present on the site from where you link to all the important pages of the site. The idea is not trying to optimize the home page alone, but each and every page of the site. The secondary and tertiary pages of the site will only be recognized and indexed by the search engines if the spider can reach those pages. There should not a single broken link on any page of the site especially the index/home page.

9. Links to the Site:

This involves ascertaining links that point to your site. The online world is not much different as compared to offline world. The celebrities in the real world are all famous and rich people i.e. have high SERPs. The reason they are famous is because so many people are familiar with them and know about their lives. The same principal applies to web-sties. The more the sites link to your site, the higher it will rank on search engines. This is an ongoing task and therefore a lot of effort should be spent in obtaining links from other sites. In an ideal world you should have all the sites linking to yours and your site not linking out at all. However this is not possible, but the idea should always be kept in mind when trying to acquire links. Also the quality of incoming link plays a big role in determining the overall benefit derived and its effect towards increasing the SERPs. The better the quality the better the result and so on so forth.

These are some of the techniques, which if used effectively can directly help in increasing not only traffic, potential customers but also the rankings on all search engines. In the end it's not only about what you know but how you act. Hard work, dedication and patience is always a recipe for success, whether working online or offline.