Search engine optimization is important for getting a higher ranking on search engines. Nevertheless, it is a tough job and can be costly if you hand it to search engine optimization companies to take care of your website for you.

Some large companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get their websites to rank higher in the large search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Of course, you can definitely choose to do it all by yourself - which is great by optimizing these 6 things on your website:

1. Title Tag The title tag is the most powerful on-site search engine optimization you have, so use it creatively. What you place in the title tag should only be exact keywords you used for the web page that you are trying to optimize. Every single web page should have its own title tag.

2. Alt Tag The Alt tag is the texts for a picture. When you roll-over your mouse onto a picture and it shows some texts, you're seeing an alt tag. You should put your main keywords in the alt tags but don't abuse it or you might be caught by the intelligent search engine indexing spiders and cause a big drop in your rankings instead.

3. Link Popularity Link popularity is the most important search engine optimization technique you should emphasize on. You need to request links constantly to increase your page rank as well as link popularity - you also increase traffic this way. Make sure you have the correct anchor text from your link partners.

When your website popularity increases, many people will want to exchange links with you. Make sure your potential link partners will not be having a website that competes with you, and never exchange links with link farms(websites with only links, without content).

4. Keyword Density This optimization factor is rather important. To improve your keyword density, you should use the appropriate keywords once in the title tag, once in the heading tag, once in bold text, and try to get a keyword density of more than 20% - of course, without resulting in your contents causing confusion just because it doesn't sound right.

5. Website Design More and more people are getting onto the approach of using flash, movies, and that really cause index spiders(or robots) to frown as they don't understand them. You need more contents which outweighs HTML, use less java scripts if you can choose not to.

6. Keywords Placing You should include one keyword each at the top and the bottom of your web page. Other than that, it is most advisable to include one of them at the first and last sentence of your content.

If you don't have a H1 title, include one with your keyword inside. Index spiders tend to place quite a large emphasis on them.

Search engine optimization rules can change anytime and will result in the increase and dropping rank of your site, so never depend on it fully. If you need a steady traffic to your site, try to get more links to your site instead - it's the safest way.

About the author:

Mark Flavin Is An Expert On Making Money Online & All Work From Home Topics. Find Out How Mark Makes His Living Online At http://markflavin.com/index.html