How can I make my website rank highly on search engines?

To rank highly on some search engines, having good keywords, title and description is not enough unless your web site relates to something that is very uncommon. The following are some tips to help you optimize your pages.

Page Design

It is best to avoid the use of frames. Some search engines can navigate frames to varying degrees, but if possible it is best to avoid using them.

Graphics

Search engines cannot read graphical text, so it is important to find a balance. From a search engine perspective the best webpage would be totally text and simple. However such a page would most likely be boring to the web site visitor and make your page bland.
If your links are all graphical then you should place text links at the bottom of the page as well.

Make use of an ALT tag for graphics and add keywords and phrases into the ALT description. You shouldn’t go overboard with this, but your images should all have ALT tags containing one or two key phrases.

Keywords

To have defined META tags is not enough to score highly in the search engines. Each search engine uses it own ranking methods, but they all match the phrase searched for with the overall content of your page.

Before attempting to optimize your own pages look at your competition (the sites ranking highly in the search engines). You can use "view-source" in explorer to look at the HTML of the page and look at their keywords and description. To do a deep analysis you will need to check the density of keywords and phrases in their pages.

The most important key words or phrases must be contained in your title. These should preferably be the first elements of your title as this holds more weight. Don't use stop words like "to", "the", "and" in your title. Such words are ignored by search engines as they are so common and will dilute the relevancy of your title.

Your description must contain the relevant keywords. Keywords are most often separated by commas however it is preferable not to use them in your keywords. For example

                                web, hosting, web hosting, web site hosting         VS        web hosting web site hosting

The 2nd example is shorter and provides more opportunity to be found. There are more combinations of potential phrases in the 2nd version, for example you would also get "site hosting", "hosting web site" and so forth. Although it takes some effort, if you plan carefully you can optimize optimize the placement of the words to achieve many possible combinations that would not be found if you used commas.

Your important phrase or keywords must appear at the top of your page, preferably first and within a header tag <h1>important phrase</h1>. You must then ensure that you use the phrases throughout the whole document, particularly in the top 1/3 of the page.
Search engines calculate the density of a word in your page. Each search engine is different in this respect, but you can examine the word density in your competitors’ page and try to match it.

Make sure your keywords are relevant to the page as you are building a theme on your page for the search engine to find. Your keywords must be in your title, keywords list, description and mixed throughout your page.

Don't:

• Stuff your page with keywords and no content. Search engines will penalize you for this and view your page as spam.
• Make any text the same color as the background. Originally this trick was used to fill pages with keywords to fool search engines. It does not work anymore and will likely get your page dropped from the search engines.
• Put redirects or META refresh tags on your page for any reason. They will get your pages banned from the search engines. In the past web pages with 100% text were created, and although they were highly search engine friendly, they were of 0% user value. Such pages would have a redirect to the real page. This trick doesn't work anymore so avoid it.
• Put words in your keywords that are not in your content.
• Add in popular words that have no relation to your page.