Getting a top search engine ranking can be extremely challenging, especially if you’re competing with a big site or going after very competitive keywords. Once you’ve knocked out all the easy things like a keyword rich title and content with appropriate keyword density, there are some smaller details you can look to which will help boost your ranking.
1) Keywords in your URL – both your domain and the rest of your page URL are good candidates for keywords. A page name that contains your exact keyword phrase tells the search engines that your page is really about that topic and that you deserve top search engine ranking for it. Try to avoid names that are generic with an id parameter or anything like that.
2) Alt tags on images – if you have images on your page, make sure to add alt text to them and to include keyword rich descriptions in those tags. Alt tags are intended to be used whenever your image can’t be seen, to describe what should have been there. An alt tag with relevant keywords confirms for the search engines that your page is about what it claims to be about.
3) Use of header tags – Header tags, H1, H2, etc emphasize content visual for readers. The search engines look at that information and infer that you would emphasize the most important content. They therefore assign greater importance to content contained within header tags. Take advantage of that by including your most important keywords in your header tags. It will help push you to the top of the search engine rankings.
4) Fill in your meta description – This doesn’t fall strictly into the realm of increasing your search ranking, but it’s related. Search engines do use this content to help determine relevancy, but more importantly many of them use it to display in the search results. If you have a good description here, visitors will be more likely to click on your link, more likely to visit your site, and more likely to link to you which will increase your ranking in the long run. After all, there’s no sense getting ranked well if no one every clicks through to your site.
To attain a top search engine ranking for competitive terms takes a lot of work. There are many things you can do to improve your search position, and these tips where will help you get even more mileage from pages that have already had their first round optimization done.