What is the secret to top website placement on the major search engines? You can be sure that there will be many people (“experts”) that will be willing to share this secret with you in return of course of a nice fat fee or by providing them with other resources. If you are intelligent, you should be able to figure out the “secret” by yourself. Just observe and analyze the rankings of the biggest search engines and you might be able to tell that there’s actually no secret at all – if the content of your website is good, unique and original, if the information you give is relevant and up-to-date, if you have found your niche, well, then you have found also the key to success. But all this sounds almost too easy, right? Let’s try to be more specific.

In first place, you should be aware that the most important feature of your website is its content. This is the magic word that will be the key to good positioning on search engines. Choosing the appropriate and catchy title, working on your keywords, balancing their density and your content’s quality – all this should be carefully done while at the same time keeping in mind your visitors’ needs and demands. The information should be readable and accessible. You will have to think also about your content’s visibility. Too much code can make your website’s information irrelevant. It is a good idea to use CSS when formatting your website. This will lead to balancing the mark-up and the content and will improve website’s performance.

Another aspect of your website is its navigation and its main structure. Don’t underestimate their importance. The search engine crawlers will go only through a part of your website’s content and will rank the used keywords according to their importance and according of their position on the page. Consider the H1, H2 tags. They are called headers and all content placed in them is having more importance than the content in P tags, meaning paragraph text. These headers will be seen differently by ordinary people, too, because they have been highlighted and have been presented in different font size by default. Placing all your content in header tags won’t work, either and this will be seen as tricking by the search engines because your page wouldn’t look like a standard document. Legitimate WebPages have a different structure and that will be marked by the crawlers.

In second place, you should be aware how the other internet pages are reacting to your website. The biggest search engines put more importance to websites with more incoming links they have gathered from other important web pages. If your website is well indexed and is receiving a lot of backlinks from other leading websites, this will increase its value in the search engines’ rankings. This could be one of the secrets to top website placement on major search engines. For example, if you offer leather garments, a link from Chanel’s website will be extremely valuable and will put you on the top of the charts of all garment retailers. Such link will have much more importance than, let’s say, hundreds of links coming from directories or articles or forum posts. It’s useful to develop a strategy concerning how to use the links to your website and how to create more of them. Think about each link as an advertisement of your website. You would prefer to be mentioned on national television than on a local radio, right? Think the same way about website links. Search engines pay attention also about the source of the link or the so called “anchor text”. They will review the relevance of the context and will rank the website according to the good relevance ratio between the link and the text of the link.

Search engines differ by the algorithms and the ranking systems they use. However, they all aim at providing their customers with the best quality service – presenting the most relevant search results. By that, all of them understand the best results in terms of content quality. Visitors are looking for useful information, original content and reliable data, so the way people rank websites is the same as the way search engines rank websites. You will have to provide the best service in terms of consistently relevant information, well chosen topics, carefully put keywords and smart titles. The success of your website will also depend on your popularity among other websites. You have to become a trusted source in order to gain the loyalty of visitors. How well your website is indexed and what is the quality of your backlinks are important questions for your SEO strategy. You might be tempted to leave your SEO planning to professional agencies but be careful as many might do more harm than good for your website. Intelligent decisions and systematic efforts might simply be a better answer for your business.