by: Syd Johnson

1. Search engines read your pages from the top down.

So, you want to use your critical keywords at least once in the first paragraph on each web page. Then you can use it once in each paragraph after that and in the last line. Use the search engine keywords in your page title and in the name of your page if possible. All of this coordination will result in a much higher placement on Google, Yahoo and many other search engines.

2. Write shorter articles

The top search engines experts believe that google gives much more weight to relatively smaller pages. The theory behind this is that web surfers have such a short attention span that thesis length pages will be ignored; therefore, they are not useful in search engine results.

A good guide for online articles is 300 to 600 words. Typically, you don't want to go under 200 because the information would probably be discarded as too short to adequately explain any topic in detail.

3. Original content works best

If you are going to submit an article to an ezine or other article directories, make a few changes before you do so. Overall, the search engines prefer fresh original content. While duplicate content gets your name out on the web and lots of incoming links, after a while, your site will start to suffer if you post the same article on your website.

The search engines will see it as duplicate content and only the highest ranking pages will get credit for the articles. If your site is not the highest ranking, your article can help another website get more traffic than you do. So, make a few changes, or better yet, create two separate articles on the same topic.

Place one on your site, and submit the other one to the search engines. You get the incoming links and other websites will have to deal with the consequences of an article that is distributed over 600 times online.

4. Follow the links

The purpose of links is not only to get a high google rank, but also as a way to bring in traffic. Seek out links from sites with a high page rank and exchange links with some of your competitors.

It helps the search engines to quantify your field of expertise since a site about web hosting wouldn't naturally link to a cooking site. You outbound links are just as important as your inbound links. It's the friends' theory… show me where you link and I'll tell you what type of website you are.

Ok, so it's my theory, but you get the idea.