There are methods to increase your search engine rankings which may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue.

I did once upon a time until I realised its not so bad after all! I am here to tell you - the time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking as you can manage for your website is essential to get any free visitors rather than burn your wallet on pay per click such as adwords for example.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site.The higher the pages come up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website.

That's what search engine optimization is about.

You can lose in all the technical information to figure out how to optimize your web pages. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, and quite likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.

Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage's title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.

Next, click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you click through. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself.

Avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.

Website content has much relevance. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than amazing graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your information etc such as your site.

Aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. For ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However,the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.

Next I need to mention something called meta tags. I never paid much attention here previously as I did not really know what they are about in web page design.It is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect.

Still, it's worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.The rules always seem to change anyway! To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select "source."

If there are meta tags, they appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name="keywords" content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.

If you type in "free link popularity check" in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. If there aren't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign.

Contact quality sites and request that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Only if its a relevant link will the traffic be of value.Oh.. by the way don't get upset if you get no response from a request to exchange links, its nothing personal and if you have low ranking, you need to improve it before someone might consider a link swap.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. I have to admit to ignoring it for a long while mainly because it seemed like long and tedious work! There was a time maybe only a few years ago when you could show up in a search engine like google quite quickly like a month.

Well that day is over for many sites due in part to sheer volume of pages on the web from the very good to the very awful. Its easy to find or look for the latest SEO secrets some of which are recycled rubbish so why not, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can't boost your rankings yourself.

This is a critical all-important factor in Internet marketing. Ok, we can't all have the number one spot but occupying the millionth listing is not so clever either.Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality visitors will be directed your way.

Sure there are probably a few good people or companies on SEO but you can start off with the tips above and apply them if you have not done so before now.

Christopher Ruane