When I look in the webmaster forums, I can't help but laugh at all the "blind leading the blind" that is going on. There's post after post of how to improve search engine rankings from people who don't have the first clue as to what they are writing about. They are just repeating what some other ignorant person wrote.

Basic search engine optimization (seo) is very simple, but people who don't take time to learn it have turned this into a bunch of technical B.S.

The first thing you need to do when looking to improve search engine rankings is to understand how a search engine works.

You may not put allot of thought into it when performing a search on google, but you need to start! What do you expect a search engine to provide for you? Relevant results right? Otherwise you will be clicking the back button and constantly trying a different search term. Isn't it annoying to you when you perform a search and have to search and search to find the information you are looking for?

In order for a search engine to successfully keep users performing searches with their site, they need to provide the most relevant, and useful sites for a given search. Each search engine has different measures to provide these results.

Google is the most popular, so I am going to explain the basics of google search engine rankings.

Google uses a websites popularity, and relevancy of site content as its biggest factor to determine it's rank.

Google measures Popularity by the amount of relevant incoming links that point to the site. Now does this mean you should go place a link to your site any and everywhere you can get one? NO! As a matter of fact I suggest that you try to trade links with websites that your site will compliment twice monthly only. 

Obviously google is looking for sites that have gained natural links by being a good site, not who can post the most links on the web.

The best way to do this is advertise your website with sites such as yahoo search marketing, and use google analytics to run reports on what your visitors are doing once on your site. Learn what all of these reports are and what you need to do to improve your results.

Keep advertising your website,  watching your reports, and improving your websites performance. As you continue to improve your website, you will automaticly improve search engine rankings.  

Ask yourself this: If google put a site at the top of search results solely because it had links pointing to it from every directory on the web, would it be providing the best results? Of course not!

The relevancy of the site linking to your site is what will improve search engine rankings for your site. The millions of website directories across the Internet that these webmasters have been placing a link on holds little to no weight with google. Your incoming links need to be gained in a natural way.

How can you do this? By creating a site that provides useful information, or services that is creative and different. People will then chat about it, and other websites will naturally want to point their users to your site.

You can boost the popularity of your site by advertising, press releases, articles, and emails to bloggers and other webmasters that your site will compliment. If your site is not providing useful information, or service that visitors perceive as a value, than its just not going to work. Period!

Relevancy of site content is another thing often mentioned right before people put away their common sense. There is a little more to the way google measures your sites relevancy, but again its basic common sense.

Google crawls your site and measures the keyword density of your site, which is the ratio of keywords to the entire text. Once someone performs a search and clicks on your site they will follow your visitor and use very basic reports, such as pages per visit, and length of time on a page, to determine the relevancy of your site

If your average visitor stays on your site for a good length of time for a certain keyword than your site will rank higher for that keyword. If they only stay on your site for a couple of seconds and click the back button than your site will rank low for that keyword.

Create a google analytics account and you will receive the information that I mentioned in this article as well as other reports. Google uses many of the same same reprorts that your analytics account runs for you to determine a websites rank. Learn what each of these reports are being measured  and how you can improve them. Improve these reports and you will improve search engine rankings.

Many people waist all of their time trying to improve search engine rankings, thinking that if they just improve their search engine rankings then they will receive visitors, and make money. What they should be doing instead, is trying to improve their sites appeal to visitors who are looking for what they have to offer. The only magic formula that exists to improve search engine rankings is to create a site that visitors will stay on, and come back to.