How to get higher rankings in search engines? The answer to this question is getting complicated by the day. SEM or Search Engine Marketing is fast becoming a big phenomenon, as far as internet marketing is concerned. Wasting money on pay-per-click promotions is pass?.

Here are few of the most important SEO tips out of the thousands available, to achieve higher rankings in major search engines.

Finding the Right Keywords

There is no point optimising your web portal for keywords that aren't going to be searched for. Finding the right keywords may not be that easy but it's worth the effort. You can always take help from a number of tools available on the internet to get you the right keywords. Please stay away from websites that ask you to register first. Don't pay for things that you can get for free!

Make ambiguous searches for keywords to get better suggestions.

Know Thy Competitor

The number of incoming links to your website will govern your rankings in search engine results. Discover your competitors and get to know the number of incoming links they have. Use appropriate tools and softwares for the job. A number of them are available on the internet.  

It's good to know the number of competitors you have before you get down to designing your website.

Title Optimisation

Titles and META tags should be different for different pages on your site. Google displays only the first 66 characters (including spaces). Try and keep your title under 66 characters. It's important to have a title that exactly defines the contents of your webpage.

Want to be on the first page of search engine results? Include relevant keywords in the title as well. Make sure not to repeat them more than thrice as this is considered as spam by all search engines.

This is just a bit of information on how to use SEO techniques to go about optimising titles. There's more available on the internet.

Using Headings

Headings play an important role as well. Though, there are some guidelines to using them. W3C guidelines as well as some other common best practises are employed for web page organisation.

Use at least three headings. Please do not try to make a page that's full of headings. Fill spaces up with content that provides relevant information.

Using Title Attributes

It's a common practise employed by a number of web marketers to not include the topic of the page in the URL. It's a great   tactic to include the topic of the page in the URL. This is a way to inform search engines about the kind of link they are looking at.

Alt Attributes

This is typically used for image searches.

Go online for examples and a better understanding of the subject of SEO and SEM