You may be wondering how search engines arrange the top pages from millions of others. There are calculations involved and you have to work with these to put your site in page one.

How Do Search Engines Work?

There are three important elements that make up the database and finding of relevant material by search engines. From the inputting of words, the search until the hierarchy of results, there is a process that is mathematically formulated and produces the links and sites that suit best.

1. The web crawler. This is also known as a spider or robot which roams the web. It is a program that translates web pages and any existing links relevant to the page. The web crawler begins by looking through the web addresses that are available in its database or index. Any other page on the internet is added to the database should the web crawler consider it relevant to its existing index. Thus, the database continually grows and the web crawler also goes back to the index to check for updates and again search for new available links.

2. The index. The index holds all information of websites and pages that the web crawler has discovered during its frequent web roaming. Whenever any website or page is updated by the owner, the index also updates its stored information thus it continually grows over time.

3. The search engine. A search engine is a software that goes through all the information stored in the index whenever a search is done by a web browser. An algorithm supports the final results according to how relevant the websites found are to the search. The hierarchy of page results is determined by shutting on or off categories that the search engine feels is relevant to the search.

The Goal of Search Engines

The ultimate goal of a search engine is to provide the most relevant and informative web pages to the web browser. The effectiveness of search engines may be tested through search engine optimization. Page results for different search engines may vary depending on the algorithm that they are using. Thus, website owners aim to improve their rank based on the algorithm.

How Can I Get on Page-On of Search Engines?

1. Links. Links are small routes leading to your website thus a lot of these will increase your visibility in search engines. When typing in a search, it is possible for your URL to be exposed even if the engine may be revealing another website housing your link.

2. Page Summary. Make your page summary more effective by using meta tag names and using keywords in a balanced manner. Be more flexible in your websites description so that it can stand out even if the search is bound for a different category. This prevents your website from being completely shut out by the search engine.

3. Title. Although the true nature of the fixed algorithm used by search engines is not fully known, it might help to start with titles that begin with the letters A to E. Engines arrange equal scoring websites in alphabetical order.

4. Keywords. Wisely input keywords in your web pages. More is not better when it comes to key words since engines will decrease your value with too much repetition. Four to five keywords per page is the most you may be using to help boost your visibility.

5. URL. Share your URL as much as you can in multi and single-database services to increase your value. You may also put it in blogs, your friends linking addresss and emails.

There are many ways to get great rankings in the search engines, and many people think theyre a secret but thats just not true. Once, top 10 spots were very easy to obtain, but getting multiple top spots is now a thing of the past. Some people say that top 10 spots are very hard to get these days, but we have managed it on many occasions recently. Here are some of our success stories.

Every SEO company should strive to get your website listed in at least the top 20 although there are no guarantees, they shouldnt have much difficulty in achieving this if they use proper keyword placement. If a company cant get you ranked within the top 20 on some of your keywords then its time to look for another SEO company.

SEO success relies on inside knowledge of search engine algorithms and ranking techniques. This, combined with testing websites before submission, will give you good results, as long as you keep it ethical.

SEO Success Stories from Clients.

R. Nishimoto (Desert Hot Sauce): “Search engine optimization took our company from a few sales a week to more than 60 sales per week. We could no longer run this business with only two people. I am convinced that without this we would still be back at a few sales or even be under by now. ”

AL (DVI Video Walls): “We are pleased with our web presence, many new customers, I will tally the sales increase at year-end. I know that the web page has now paid for itself at least once! More later, we are very busy - a couple competitors are going out of business so we are getting many panic calls.”

Jenny (Music Asylum): “Your search engine techniques have produced the best return on our advertising dollars which was even better than any promotion we have done in the past. I am talking about quantifiable results the company can attribute directly to our website. At first, I couldn’t see how your search engine work would make any difference based on the poor results from our old website. I have to give you credit though you got our site found on top of the major engines resulting in many calls, e-mails and eventual sales. Thanks.”

Chris (Legacy Golf): “We are very impressed with the short period of time that it took to get our website listed in the search engines, we hoped it would place high but never expect to be one of the top 3.”

(3rd Rock Internet Services): “Our Internet services company would not have any business if it were not for the efforts made to increase sales, being listed in the top 20 of the search engines was a great accomplishment that we were hoping would come true and now it has.”

Scott (XTS.NET) “The company was struggling before we had the site optimized and now we are able to stay in business and keep up with the demands of our clients.”

Companies like these are finding it ever more important to be placed where they can be found on the web if you think that search engine placement isnt necessary then think again. With the Internet business marketplace continuing to grow, youll have more competition to deal with every day.

When customers cant find a company, the business goes bankrupt. You need to get ahead of your competition, and stay ahead. Now is the time to prepare for the future, before its too late.

I have been on the Internet for a long time. At least I have been doing marketing a long time in relation to the Internet as a commercial entity.

Around the end of 1995 I speculated in domain names, learning about keywords and phrases and how they help the search engines find the content you are providing at your website.

I continued to learn about keywords and as search engine optimization became a necessity I was ready to use what I had learned about keywords and phrases, domain names, search engines and content.

There were quite a few people, say a couple of hundred who really knew how to use keywords to optimize websites.

However, then it was to help search engines do a better job of indexing all of the content on the web. Now it seems the roles are reversed and the search engines are in charge. At least many seem to think so.

Now there are also a lot of people, thousands, who claim to know all of the search engine secrets and some claim they can get you top listings if you just sign up with them, buy their Ebooks, buy their videos, or buy their software.

I always have a hard time with the math. If these guys can guarantee you a top 10 listing for your keywords, then 11 companies sign up for their service that are also targeting your keywords or phrases, then how do they get all 11 customers a top 10 listing?

There are a lot of things we have known about the importance of for years such as anchor text, titles for links, surrounding links with keywords in the body text to make the links more relative, alt tags, metatags, keyword count, and more.

But now almost every day I see a website or article promoting a new search engine secret and it has a name I have never heard of. Then when I investigate and read up on it I find that they have renamed anchor text something else, keyword-count something else, etc.

Just like Hollywood these days seem to only be remaking movies we have already seen and giving them new names, it seems there are a lot of people out there now renaming SEO methods that are as old as the Internet with new names and selling them as new secrets.

They sell you these new secrets on video, in an Ebook, in a Seminar, or produce software that optimizes your website for you.

Most of the SEO Gurus of today never actually optimized a website for themselves or anyone else with any good results. They simply advertised to other people that they know how to make them rich in 90 days with little or no work at all and can promise you top 10 search engine rank in all the major search engines.

There are some of us who actually do the work and will keep on doing so and remaining ethical about the business. Its just hard to sit by and see so many people bilked out of their money with promises that no one can keep.

I have clients send me stuff all the time.

Hey look at this new SEO technique I got in my email!

“Look at this website I found that can get us top listings in 30 days!

I go and read up on it for my client and find the same old stuff repackaged once again. Things I am already doing for the client is now a video or an Ebook and they cannot understand why I would recommend not spending money on it.

If you are going into business on the web and you read this article, just learn one thing from it.

There are NO shortcuts to success. Get rich quick schemes are just schemes. There is no magic formula or secret to getting top listings in the major search engines.

If there is a secret, it is that it actually requires hard work to be successful on the web just like it takes hard work to become successful with any business on or offline.

Buying an Ebook or a video or some software is not going to make you rich or get you top listings in the search engines. Anyone who tells you that work is not required to make money on the web is lying to you.

Learn how to do this for yourself or hire a professional who does not promise you the sky, but also hire one that can prove the results they have gotten for clients and for their own websites.

Testimonials are worth absolutely nothing.

Chris McElroy is amazing! He got me a top 10 listing for my website in less than thirty days! The videos are easy to follow and in just days I was an SEO expert. I recommend everyone buy his Ebooks too! -John Doe, New York

Now dont you just want to run right out and buy my video? Too bad I dont have one to sell.

Nope, no Ebooks either.

No Software to make you rich.

But I can do the search engine optimization and promotion for your website and prove the results with weekly increases in link popularity and search engine indexing.

Long-term SEO maintenance requires dedication to your website. There are people who think that they can throw up a web page and that people will find them, and good luck too them but it wont happen. Any website that wants to make money needs to get optimized, and stay that way. Running and SEO campaign once or twice isnt enough in this market: you need to consider long-term maintenance of your SEO.

For long term SEO maintenance to be effective, you need to constantly monitor the search engines algorithms, which can change very frequently. You also need to keep track of your competitors optimizations and adapt your strategy accordingly.

Always consider your website as an investment youve put time, money and effort into it. Your investment needs to be protected, and the way to do that is SEO maintenance. This makes sure that your website is ranked high enough to bring you the traffic you need, and keeps the sales coming.

Weve compiled a list of tips to help you with your SEO maintenance. To keep good rankings, you need to pay attention to how your site is doing. A few things to remember are:

1. Check on your pages regularly and make sure theyre still listed. Your listings are the most important part of your SEO work. Whether the page is listed or not is vastly more important than what key words you have etc. After all, if you arent listed at all what good is it to optimize?

2. Monitor the listings every week or two to make sure your pages are displaying correctly and that there are no problems with your site. While your at it see whether youve risen, dropped, or remained constant as far as listings go. Odds are that you will not remain constant, if you do remain constant you should consider this a small success as you have probably risen above other pages that were formerly above you while others from below you have surpassed you.

3. Watch for trouble, and fix it quickly. Dont think it will correct itself it won’t. Any missing pages should be checked out thoroughly. Chances are that the system has run into a problem, but if you dont check it out you may very easily be wrong. Always correct any of your mistakes as your mistakes can be very costly if they are not dealt with in a timely fashion.

4. Resubmit your site if you make major changes, but not for anything smaller. The most important time to resubmit your site is if you have recently changed your titles. Titles are very important in SEO and can deliver you with a completely new set of quality key words.

5. Create monthly ranking reports on your site, to see if any changes need to be made.

6. Keep building your link popularity.

7. Keep submitting your site to the big directories, as spiders use these as a starting point.

8. Watch your competitors and the methods they use. If they start trying to cheat, report them straightaway it gets them out of your way.

9. Set goals for yourself. Write out an SEO maintenance plan, and if things change then make sure to set new goals and stick with them.

10. Stay up to date on the latest SEO information.

11. Check your sites performance if youre not monitoring your traffic, find a tool to do it now.

12. Maintain a solid plan for dealing with your sites growth. Dont panic if you see a blip.

This might seem like a lot of work for a small website or company, but you need to do it to help your website grow. If you dont have growth, you have nothing. No business wants to stay where it is forever, and SEO is a good way to get more business and stay in the race.

Do you remember why you started a website to begin with? The chances are you wanted to make money. Your website is a business, and you need to run it like one. Dont stress too much over the work involved: its only a few hours each week in total, and you can do it whenever you want.

It’s the timeless question: how do you get other sites to link to you? The most commonly discussed ways are reciprocal linking (swapping links) and buying links. Yet there’s another important tool for building links that should be a part of your toolbox: distributing content in exchange for one-way inbound links.

Comparison with Other Linking Methods
Reciprocal Linking: The big advantage of content distribution over swapping links is that the links built are one-way, and therefore presumably more valuable. Of course, reciprocal links still have value, but relying primarily on them might hamper your SEO efforts.
Indirect Reciprocal Links: I link my site A to your site, so you link your site to my site B. The problems are that this can be a lot of work, and also, Google can detect indirect links if you do it more than once with the same group of sites, which might make your linking arrangements look like a link farm.
Paid Links: The problem with paid links is 1) the costs add up; 2) search engines are getting better and better at discounting paid links. According to Matt Cutts’ blog, “I wouldn’t be surprised if search engines begin to take stronger action against link buying in the near future…link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext).”

Kinds of Content to Distribute
Articles. This is the essential kind of content distribution, to the point that many people consider content distribution simple as “article marketing.” However, you’re missing out on a few other sources of links if you only do articles.
News blurbs. A lot of news-style sites will only reprint pieces of a couple of paragraphs. The good news is that often enough the whole point of these news blurbs is to include links to other sites, in a sort of “look what we’ve found” kind of way, a la Slashdot.org
Press Releases. There are some sites that aggressively reprint press releases. A press release is like an article, only in a very specific press release format, and frankly that’s not that enjoyable to read. I don’t know why some sites are so head-over-heels over press releases, but, hey, that’s their business. The good news is that even if you can’t write and don’t want to hire a writer, press releases (at least basic ones) are pretty easy to do.
Tools, games and other webware. Sites with popular tools, software, Flash games and other webware often let other sites use it in exchange for a link. The big potential downside is technical support.
Images. Images, especially charts and photographs, are important forms of content on the web. If you have great images on your site and people ask you to use them on their sites, require a backlink in exchange. The problem with images is that they are so easily stolen. Stolen words can be uncovered with a web search. You could try to watermark images with a copyright symbol, URL, and the link requirement. But in the process you’d make the image much less desirable.
Web design templates. These have been freely distributed for a long time. Yet they are even more easily stolen than images. Also, if you embed a link in the footer of a web template, what you’ll get back are sitewide links, which are often thought to be filtered out in search engines.

Maximizing Content Distribution Links’ Effectiveness: Anchor Text
Anchor text. You need optimized anchor text to rank high for any competitive keyword. That means you need your target keyword in the anchor text, and very importantly, variants of the target keyword (too many links with the exact same anchor text may be filtered). The problem is that some sites by default don’t let you choose the anchor text of the link to your site. So you need to: 1) look for sites that do reprint content with optimized anchor text; 2) specifically ask for your target anchor text to be used. Also, do keep in mind that a true natural linking structure will require you to have a number of links that are not anchor-text-optimized, typically with the URL as the anchor text.

How to Find Sites
Finding sites to submit content is the biggest challenge. You can start by asking around to any other webmasters you already have a relationship with. Next, web-search. The classic method is “submit article” + [keyword]. Most of the sites you find this way won’t be good candidates, which is why this can be a bit labor-intensive. I use offshore labor for this step, as well as a program that will sort and store all the search results into a spreadsheet; otherwise it might not be worth it. Then again, the same would be true for finding reciprocal linking partners.

Ethical Issues & Best Practices

Golden rule: remember that there’s a human being who has to approve your article for submission.
Read and adhere to all submission guidelines.
Avoid automation. There’s almost always some detail of submission that requires a human eye: a multitude of html formatting requirements, changing site themes, etc.
Don’t submit by email unless specifically instructed. Using a contact form prevents possible sp@m accusations.
Only approach websites that request content submissions.
Don’t misrepresent reprint content as original.
Don’t submit the same content too often. After about two hundred reprints, a lot of people will be seeing the same thing over and over again and possibly complaining.

In short, as SEO gets more competitive, having more and more linking methods at your disposal gets more and more important. Don’t overlook this important tool.

In order to tap into the power of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) elements, you first need to know what they are. In HTML, elements are bits of markup that tell a web browser to display or format parts of web pages. For example,

means paragraph, and means bold there are plenty more. These elements are used constantly when writing web pages. You should basically think of your HTML elements as the organizational and visual formatting of your HTML document.