It has become more and more difficult to achieve that number 1 position for your website in search engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN. Type in a phrase like "home business" into Google and you'll have your pick of over 2 billion pages!! "Internet Marketing" returns more than 300 million results and "Make Money" over 300 million results.

How on earth do you as a webmaster compete with all of these sites and get your own site on to the first page in Google? With that majority of searchers not looking beyond the first 3 pages of results, you can't be satisfied with just a top 100 position.

There are three key activities that are essential for achieving a top ranking. These are:

1. Picking the right keyword phrase
2. Optimizing your site correctly for your choses keyword phrase
3. Building up as many high quality backlinks as you possible can

Picking the right keyword phrase for your site is crucial and if you just throw your site together without a thought on keywords you are most likely doomed for failure. The best tool you can use for keyword research is Wordtracker and at only a few dollars for a day's keyword research, this is a worthy investment. Your aim is to find a keyword phrase that is suitable for your site and has a healthy number of searches per day, but is not too competitive. Read more about Keyword Research before moving on to the next stage.

Once you have chosen your keyword phrase, the next stage is to optimize your index page (or the sub page that you are targeting) for that phrase. As long as you know a little HTML, this is very easy to do. Here are a few tips.

• Ensure that the Title tag on your page contains your keywords. This is one of the most important parts. Don't stuff this tag with lots of keywords - concentrate on one or two important keyword phrases.
• List your keywords inside the meta tags. Most search engines no longer use meta tags, but some make use of them so it is still worthwhile using these.
• Ensure that the first occurance of readable text on your page contains your keywords
• Ensure that your keywords are mentioned in the initial paragraph of your page
• Use your keywords throughout the text of your page - but be careful not to overdo this. Your page should still be readable by humans!
• Use your keywords between the headline tags on your page (H1 tags an H2/H3 tags)
• Occasionally bold or italicise your keywords
• Make sure that links pointing back to each page on your site contain the keywords for each page in the anchor text/
• Give all your images an "ALT" tag and put your keywords in here too - again, don't overdo this
• Add some of your keywords in your outbound links

Finally, but most importantly, once you have your site optimized you need to concentrate on building up as many high quality links to your site as you possibly can. Do this steadily and gradually by using techniques such as writing and publishing articles, Submitting your site to Directories and reciprocal linking. You may also want to try blogging, writing press releases and posting in forums that allow a signature.

Getting your site on the first page of the search engines isn't something that can be done instantly. It can take weeks, months, or even years, depending on how competitive your keywords are. Monitor your progress regularly and compare your site to the site of your competitiors. What is your page rank, compared to the page rank of the site that has the number one spot in Google for your chosen keyword phrase? How many backlinks do they have? What is their keyword density?

Visit Higher Search Engine Ranking for lots more tips on improving your search engine ranking.

There are many tools that you can use to help with the whole process of analyzing keywords, analyzing your competitors, building up your links and measuring your progress.

• Web CEO - this software allows you to easily research keywords, check your backlinks, check your rankings, research link partners, analyze your competitors and more. You can download the Free Edition of Web CEO here.



• SEO Elite - this is a tool that covers the whole SEO process including comparing your site to competitors, finding high quality link partners, checking your ranking in all the major search engines, finding out which pages on your site have been indexed, submitting articles automatically and more.

Further Reading:

• SEO Made Easy - a free e-book
• How to Improve your Search Engine Ranking
• How to add Fresh Content to your Website
• Does the number of links on a page affect ranking?