I am frequently asked how to rank high on the Google and the other search engines and directories, There are plenty of things that you should do, but there is no absolute answer. Your ranking depends on an awful lot of factors.

Google (the largest search engine) does not tell anyone how they rank sites. They have general tips, as do all search engines, but they keep their algorithm secret. They do this to protect their top rankings from being captured by sites that do not deserve to be rated high.

Search engines aren't in business to promote your site. They exist to return the best sites available to their users. Until your site becomes the best on the Net, Google and the other search engines don't want to rank you at the top. They want to rank you exactly where you belong.

Having said that, there are plenty of things that you can do. Almost all of them are exactly the same things you should do to make your site a better experience for your visitors.

Search engines love pages. The more pages of quality content, the higher you will rank.

Search engines hate pages with little content or information. It is much better to have 25 good pages, rather than 100 skimpy pages.

Search engines hate broken links. If any of your links are broken, you will rank lower on the search engines until you fix them or remove them. A broken link is any link that does not take you to the proper page. It could be your fault because you set up the link wrong, or it could be the fault of the destination site. They could have removed or renamed the page. Either way, fix or remove the link.

Search engines love sites that have a lot of links leading to them from other sites. If your site is about grooming dogs, then you will rank higher if you acquire links from sites about dogs, grooming, animals, veterinarians, pets, supplies, etc. You should be very active about this. Get as many as you can, and keep looking for more.

Find a site you like. Write them an e-mail saying that you have already put their link on your page. Ask them to return the favor. If they decline, you can remove their link. You will get a lot more positive responses if you put their link on your site before you write to them.

Also, you can expect them to put your link on a page similar to yours. Usually, that means that you both end up on a links page, but you could also trade links for your home pages or anywhere else.

If those links come from sites that are not in your field, then those links will not help you as much. One of the tricks to get higher rankings was to get huge amounts of links leading to your site. People did this through "link exchanges." They could get hundreds or thousands of links this way. At that time, the search engines would just count the number of links. Today, they look at what kind of link it is. If it's from a site in your field, it's good. If it's outside your field, too many can be bad.

Generally having links from sites in a different category won't hurt you unless they are the only kind of links that you have. I have plenty of sites and blogs. Most of them aren't related in any way. I still link them to each other. Google doesn't mind because they are not my only links.

Search engines hate sites that are nothing but links. Some sites exist merely to send you to another site where they hope you will buy something. Search engines frown on this practice and rank them lower because of it.

That doesn't mean that a site full of links is necessarily bad. Some sites are link portals. They catalog all the related sites in their field. You can rank pretty high with such a site. Google and the others are getting good about differentiating between links that are essentially ads for another site and links that are informational in nature. I have a link portal, and Google likes it a lot.

Search engines love link pages. If you have one page on your site that has nothing but links, especially links in your particular field, then the search engines will like those pages. The majority of the links should be related to your site or field. If you can't get enough quality links through trading, you should take some off of the Internet.

Search engines love pictures and videos, even though they have trouble figuring out what they are. If it isn't made up of words, they can't really understand it. Nevertheless, they rank you higher if you have them on your pages. Please use the alt tags on pictures and videos. See below for more info on alt tags.

Search engines love tool tips.If you hover your cursor over a link and a description pops up, that is probably a tool tip. Tool tips give the search engines (and your visitors) more information about the link. Please use tool tips every chance you can. It matters more than you think.

Search engines love alt tags. Alt tags were invented to help people understand what a picture, video, or object is if they cannot see it or if their browser cannot display it. When your cursor hovers over a picture and a description pops up, that is probably an alt tag. Use alt tags as much as you can.

Search engines don't use META keywords and META descriptions as much as in the past. META keywords and descriptions do not appear on your page where your user can read them. They appear behind the page so that only the search engines can see them. Their purpose is to give the search engines a guideline as to what to expect on that site. So really, they are just keywords and descriptions aimed specifically at the search engines.

People eventually learned how to abuse the META tags. They would fill them with words that didn't have anything to do with the pages they were describing. Eventually, the search engines caught on to this trick.

The argument still rages on about their value, but META keywords are generally useless. Plenty of people ranked high with junk pages because they knew how to use META keywords. The search engines figured out what they were doing and stopped putting so much weight on META keywords. Most of them do not use them at all in their formulas.

META descriptions should still be used, but not as a tool to get you ranked higher. META descriptions sometimes show up in the search results. Don't expect to rank higher because you wrote a good META description, but a good description will improve your click-through rate.

I still use both META keywords and META descriptions. I figure it can't hurt me, and it only takes a few minutes. If you have a site, I'm sure that there is a way to use them. My best advice is to go to the Help section and type in "META keywords" or "META words." It should be a simple operation to apply them to your pages.

Search engines love and hate keywords. Use too few, and you rank low. Use too many, and you still rank low.

Use just the right amount, and they love you.

The trouble is finding a happy medium because no one knows exactly what that is.

If you bought two new programs designed to analyze your site, you would find that their advice wouldn't match. Why? Because they use different formulas. Why? Because they don't know the formulas that the search engines use.

The best advice I can give you about keywords is to just write your pages as you see fit. Once you are done with a page, go over it and look for terms that show up time after time. Each keyword should show up about 5 times.

You should also have variants of each keyword. For example, if your keyword is "clown," try to also use "clowns, clowned, clowning, clownish. You should consider synonyms. For instance, a "clown" could also be described as a fool, an idiot, a comic, or even my girlfriend's boyfriend.

In the old days, all you had to do to get ranked high for a term was to use it over and over. The more times you repeated a word, the higher you would rank. Plenty of unethical sites filled their pages with nothing but a handful of keywords. They ranked high. Try that today, and you will drop out of the rankings. You won't get punished a little. You will drop way way down.

Nowadays, search engines count the number of times a term shows up and then compare it to the rest of the words on the page. They look at whether the keyword shows up in the Domain Name, the Title, any headings, and finally the text on the page. Generally, the Domain Name and Title are more important than headings and text.

My handy dandy page analyzer tells me that the home page on one of my sites doesn't have enough instances for a certain keyword. I have a lot of pages on that site. Each page has a different mix of words. Perhaps the search engines do not like a certain keyword on a certain page, but there are plenty of other keywords and plenty of other pages. I don't care if the search engines hate that one keyword on that one page. I guarantee you that I rank well for that keyword overall.

To bring home the point that there is no definitive answer to how to get a high ranking, my page analyzer does not promise that the search engines will rank me higher if I take their advice. It always says things like, "On average, the keyword had a prominence of 31% in the top-ranking pages. We suggest having a prominence of 24 to 38 percent."

Do you see what it is saying? It doesn't know whether the search engines will rank me higher if I change. It just knows that the top-ranking pages generally are set up that way. It is guessing. And so is everyone else.

Write your pages so that they appeal to your readers. Throw in a few pictures. Use your alt tags and tool tips. Put some links on your site and get some links leading to your site. Then get to work on the next page.

If people like your site, generally the search engines will also.

Site Building in Simple Terms