Today we’re going to go over five easy to use SEO techniques which can have a significant effect on the search engine ranking of your website. I happen to do a lot of SEO analysis of competing websites and I’ve noticed that as simple and effective as these techniques are, many webmaster fail to put these strategies into action.

Even though the following SEO techniques are not guaranteed to get your site to the very top of the results pages by themselves, they are an important part of making your site more visible to people using the search engines. In fact, there are no techniques which are solely responsible for getting your site to the top. What works is a combination of many different methods such as the relevance of the content on your site to the keywords you’re trying to rank for, internal and external linking and even your site’s design.

Below are five easy and effective SEO techniques which can help to improve your site’s search engine ranking. These are aimed primarily at newcomers to SEO, but there are many long established websites which do not take advantage of these methods.

Title Tag. This is contained inside of the “HEAD” tag in each of your pages HTML just above the “BODY” tags. The content inside of your title tag will not appear on the site itself but is instead used by search engines to determine what the site is about. The title tag should include the title of the page as you would expect, as well as the primary keywords for the page. As an example; if you made a page of your website from this article, then the TITLE tag would begin with something like “5 Easy SEO Techniques – Improve Search Engine Ranking”.

Description Tag. This is a tag which is used by Yahoo and Google, though not by every search engine. Your description tag should be a short description of your site (10-20 words is good) which included your primary keyword or key phrase if this is possible.

Keyword Tag. Google and many other search engines don’t use this tag at all. Even though only some of the search engines support this tag, it does not hurt to include it and can be helpful in improving your page rank with some search engines This tag can include your brand name and even your name as well as your keywords.

Formatting. Text in bold, italics or which is underscored is seen as of greater significance by search engine and helps the crawlers to figure out how relevant your keywords and content are to each other. Make sure to put titles in bold and if it won’t detract from the look and feel of your site, underline them.

Content: There are still many webmasters who think that their content should be written for the benefit of search engines instead of that of human readers. Instead of packing your content with keywords (which can lead to your site being penalized, not rewarded by the search engines), you should write naturally and with your readers in mind; this usually results in content which contains your keywords just enough anyway.

There you have it – the 5 easiest and most important SEO techniques which every webmaster should use if they’re interested in improving their search engine ranking. You should use all five of these together; they are not a problem to implement and can make a big difference to your site’s placement in the search results.