Ranking

Google and other search engines, rank your site based the number criteria, such as:

• Links to and from your site.
• Title of your site
• Headings
• Content

Some of these and other useful tips are explained below.

Links

Links from popular sites with a higher ranking, have a higher weight then links from smaller unknown sites. Incoming links should use alt tags with a short description of your site. Use text links where possible, as spiders may not read graphical links such as animated buttons. That means they may miss most of your content. One way around this problem is to create a site map with text links to all
pages on your site and submit that to search engines.

Referrers

One of the best way's to get traffic to your site is through referrers. Referrers are usually sites that have similar or complimenting topic that link to your site.
Visit sites with a similar topic and either look for a links page with a way to add links or email the Webmaster notifying him or her of your site. Be prepared to return the favor by also linking to their site. You can use a system such as the link system to set up a links page.

To see which sites link to yours in the search field of
Google type
Link:www.yoursite.com.
This will return all the links Google has stored that link to your site.

Headings

Headings are given more weight then normal text. H1 tags should be at the top of the page and contain your page title, H2 gains importance if no H1 is found.

Meta tags and Title

One of the way search engines, webcrawlers, spiders and portals categorise sites is through Meta Tags. Meta tags such as "keywords", "description" and "title" should be placed in the head section of your page. Keywords are used to categorise your site,
so use words that you would expect users to enter when looking for your site.
Description is used to list your site with other results, use short accurate descriptions. Title is used as the clickable link to your site. As well as the Meta tag title, you should use the html <title> tag in the head of all your pages with a clear short phrase.

Content

More important than meta tags in many ways is the actual content of the site. The home or index site should contain text that explains about the site. Try to use words that people would use in a search when looking for your site. Don't use hidden words, links or cloaking (giving search engines different pages) in an attempt to trick the search engines or spiders into giving you a higher ranking. These and other similar methods when found will do your site more harm then good.

The Google Dance

The Google search engine has a couple of different types of spiders that scan the web: Freshbot and Deepbot. Freshbot comes around a various intervals during the month depending on how popular your site is and how much has changed. Deepbot comes around about once a month and indexes the whole site. Then the collected data must be propagated to the other Google databases around the world. This process takes a few days and while it is happening search results are likely to differ. The process is known as the google dance. A snapshot of each page is taken and stored. You can view the current stored version of your site by searching Google with
cache:www.yoursite.com

Other Tools and Techniques

Nowadays more and more of the search engines are trying to get paid to list sites.
Many have a choice of express or Free submission, Express is usually between 2 days and 2 weeks and can cost around US$200. There usually is no guarantee that they will list your site. Be careful not to over submit any of your sites. Generally, it's a good idea to submit about once a month. Once you get accepted into a directory, make sure you stop submitting to them. To change a directory listing, use the form provided at the directory's Website. The sites listed below are the most popular search submittion sites.