The more web pages you have ranking high on a search engine's results, the greater the traffic that's directed to your website. That's the simple explanation of what ranking high on a search engine is about.Of course, SEO is a huge topic and you can spend a lot of time figuring out how to optimize your web pages to rank high on a search engine. The alternative is to look at a few basic items in your pages and make some adjustments. Given time you will see increased traffic to your optimized web pages, but don't expect it to happen overnight. To be ranking high on a search engine there are some basic things you can do to all your web pages. Each search engine determines the ranking of your pages differently, so a page that ranks well in Google may not rank as well in Yahoo or MSN and visa versa. Each search engine determines the ranking of a web page by a very complex set of rules and assigns a weighting (mathematical term) that say's what importance, it will assign to a certain factor on the page. There are 100+ ranking factors that some search engines use Factors like page title, page description, keyword phrases in the title and description, keyword density in the page, link text of links to and from a page, number of links to a page etc. etc. It would make life a lot simpler if webmasters and designers knew what weighting (importance) each search engine gave to different aspects of a web page but search engines don't make that public. However a lot of work has been done by many people in the SEO community to figure out through tests, what the factors are. However, SEO's don't always know exactly how important these factors are and besides, the search engines keep changing the importance of them. We know many factors and the first is the title on a web page The page title appears in the top bar of your web browser when you access a web page. The title is also often used by search engines when listing your page in any search results, so it's important to get it right. Getting the right page title can be crucial if you are to gain the attention of people looking at a search results listing. It should include your most important keyword phrase for the search engine's benefit and say something meaningful to a human searcher. The title should be know more than 65 characters for most search engines, more than that and it won't appear in the search results. The next important factor for search listing is the description The description appears under the main title of the search results. This description can be taken from the META description in the header of your web page or from the first few lines at the top of your visible web page. The description should be no more than 150 characters if you want all of it to appear in the search results for the major search engines. Part II of Ranking High on a Search Engine is at:
Ranking High on a Search Engine - Pt II | 
