Although an overview of the search engine optimization (SEO) techniques is far beyond the goal of this website, here are some ideas that might help you understand positioning in the search engines’ results.

The World Wide Web has become in the last years a multimedia environment. Many new and exciting technologies can spice up a website, from sound and graphics to flash animation. However, search engines’ spiders only index the TEXT of a website! All the bells and whistles used by many web designers to increase the “wow factor” of the sites affect negatively their search engine rankings!

There are some simple design considerations when constructing “search-engine-friendly“ web pages. Content is king, but also is the page layout! Search engines usually “hate” frames, so it is preferably to use tables instead. New technologies like dynamic page generation or flash animation actually might harm your ranking so much, that it becomes a wise thing to use them only if it is unavoidable!

Generally speaking, the “ideal” high-ranking web page would contain nothing but text. For humans, this may sound boring, but in SEO terms these sites are exactly the types that have the potential to do well in search engine rankings.

The text contained in a web page has to be fine-tuned. The relevant keywords have to be placed throughout the page, but it is preferable to be more frequent in the first paragraph. Search engines’ algorithms give more importance to the text that appears “before the scroll”. Use keywords in the title tags and in the links as well. If you use headings in your text, make sure they contain your keywords!

The meta-tags are not what they used to be any longer, but they still can help. Write adequate meta-descriptions for each page of your website, according to its content. Use the keywords meta-tags wisely, and avoid “keyword-stuffing” throughout the text.

Probably the most important advice: don’t try to cheat the search engines! Some webmasters succeed to manipulate for a (short) while the search engine results by using various unethical techniques, but it’s not worth it on the long run. Search engines’ algorithms are getting “smarter” every day, and if your site will be found cheating, it might get banned from the search listings

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