The number of words you have on a page is not critical, but it must be enough for the search engine to rank your page for your chosen keyword phrase, say around 100.To be ranking high the search engine must be able to read the text, so it must be in plain HTML text and not embedded in a graphic image. Search engines can't read text in graphics and for that reason you should also NOT use pages with a lot of Flash animations and menus. If you must use flash menus add text links for search engines To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text doesn't show in highlight, it's probably in graphic form or the page is protected. If the highlighting shows the text to be in a graphic image, change the text into HTML format in order to improve your search engine rankings. I have already mentioned meta tags. This may sound confusing, but it's just a simple code that exists at the top of the HTML code in a web page. Two important tags are the TITLE tag and the Meta Description If you don't have an HTML editor to view the code in your web pages, click the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select "source." This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. The meta tags should be at the top of the page. You can read more about meta tags here at Robot Meta Tag and can create your own using my Meta tag optimization tool The importance of keyword density, or put another way the percentage your keyword phrase appears on a page compared to the rest of the text can be safely 3 to 5%, but in some cases can go much higher. Whilst still an important factor, it is less important than it used to be. The best way to determine the percentage of keywords on your pages is by using a keyword density analyzer. You can read about keyword density at :
Keyword Density - Getting the Right Result One factor that is certainly more important now is the links within your site and links to and from your site to other websites. A term you will read frequently is link popularity which in part measures the number of links to your site. But links are not about quantity, they are about quality A quality link is one from a site related (themed) to your own from a web page that is ranking high on a search engine. Gaining such quality links is part of a linking campaign which is a whole new topic outside the scope of this discussion. Essentially, it entails contacting quality sites and requesting they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link to. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, it also directs more quality traffic to your website. Before you go out and hire an SEO company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can get to be ranking high on a search engine by doing it yourself. One important thing to remember when optimizing pages for a search engine is that it all starts with choosing the right keyword phrases. Choose the wrong keywords and you may never get ranked Or you may rank well, but for keywords that no one uses to search for. So they will bring you little or no traffic. It's easy to be ranking high on a search engine for a keyword phrase or search term that no one uses, but that's absolutely pointless ! Part I of Ranking High on a Search Engine is at:
Ranking High on a Search Engine - Pt I | 
