Much like stock brokers jockey for the best position on the exchange floor at the opening bell, webmasters are constantly jockeying for the best search engine positioning on the internet. With literally millions of sites out there, the competition to be number one is fierce. Good webmasters employ every white hat trick that they can think of to make sure that their site comes up first in every search engine for the keywords that they are targeting, but sometimes, it takes more than just good web design to get the ranking they desire.

Historically, if you knew what keywords you were gunning for, you do a few simple things to see your search engine positioning improve: buy a URL with the keyword in it, make sure that those keywords appeared on your site and in your title and meta tags, and trade links with other webmasters. Today though, that is not enough. In some cases, using just these techniques can actually hurt your search engine ranking, as it is widely believed that link swapping is frowned upon by some of the search engines and that some of the engines are excluding sites based upon over usage of a keyword.

In the highly volatile internet marketplace a site that has good search engine positioning today may simply not be good enough tomorrow. Webmasters must look to constantly update and change their sites just enough to keep them high in the rankings. Adding unique content that covers their target keywords and tirelessly checking links is all in a day's work. Even this may not be enough to protect a site’s organic ratings though and many will resort to buying position through adwords campaigns. Paid traffic can bring sales but the ideal customer is a free one.

One great way to improve search engine positioning is to submit articles to article directories. These “zines” as some of them are called are information marketplaces. People searching the internet for virtually anything can find articles about their interest there. Sites that submit articles to these directories are able to provide some information and education to their prospective customers and then provide them with a well placed link back to their site, to encourage them to patronize their business. See my member profile  for great tools, tips and suggestions on how to get the most value out of your article directory submissions and how to write the best articles.