You know that you should be making your web site as attractive as possible to the search engines. A high listing can drive a lot of traffic to your web site.
Give me 5 minutes of your time to get your site headed in the right direction.

It seems like there are so many rules and things to know. Luckily there are a few easy things you can do which can make a big difference on how well your site gets listed.

As complicated as search engines can be, they are also pretty simple also. They do their very best to try and determine which site has the most relevant information for what ever word or phrase someone is searching for.

The points mentioned here can be typically looked upon favorably with most search engines. They each may have their own way of ranking sites but they share many things in common.

Sure there thousands of search engines, but only a couple dozen of them really count.
I make things easy for myself and focus on the biggest: google.com It feeds so many other search engines that I find if google is happy, most other search engines are happy to.

With that in mind let's look at some quick tips you can apply right now.

Let The Search Engine Know Your Serious About A Subject
Having done your research, you have narrowed down the keywords that people are using in the search engines to find your site.

You want to make sure that these keywords appear in the title of a page in between header "<h></h>" tags. The search engine reasons, if it so important to be a bold headline at the top of the page, it must be a strong indication that this page is dedicated to this subject.

A normal page is going to have the topic mentioned several times on the page. Don't over due it though. If you make an effort to intentionally mention the keyword dozens of times on a page, the search engine is likely to determine you are not playing nicely and will treat the page accordingly.

Rethink Your Links
When you link to a particular page, you can score points by having the keywords that are on the page you are linking to in the text of the link itself and the words surrounding it.

For example, say you have a page optimized for the term "Dog Toothbrushes". On that page, the words "Dog Toothbrushes" appears between <h1></h1> tags and there is ample talk about the subject on that page.

When you go to link to that page, you want something similar to:

Learn all about dog toothbrushes from this very informative page.

The search engine reasons the link mentions the keyword phrase and the page its being linked to has the keyword phrase in the title. This must be a very important page about dog toothbrushes!

A Picture Perfect Page
Don't ignore the importance of any graphics on the page! You would do well to name the graphic something descriptive such as dog_toothbrushes.jpg

You can also take advantage of the <alt image> tags. To see what these are, hover your mouse over this picture for a few seconds:

Everything you wanted to know about dog toothbrushes

You will see a description come up which says "Everything you wanted to know about dog toothbrushes". This alt tag is intended for people who are surfing the web with web page images shut off. It also helps blind internet users as their computer can read the text of where the picture is to them.

Its easy to add an image tag inside the html for a picture.

Here's an image tag without the alt tag:

<img src="dogtoothbrush.gif" width="100" height="100">

And here's the image tag with the alt tag included:

<img src="dogtoothbrush.gif" width="100" height="100" alt="Everything you wanted to know about dog toothbrushes">

There is some debate as to whether google still pays attention to the alt image tag or not. On the plus side, it won't be held against you and other search engines do still appear to rely on it.

These are a few basic but important tips for you. If you take just a few moments and apply it to your site, you are likely to benefit from the results with higher search engine listings.