Before we start, we would like to thank our readers for the positive feedback on our how to create a website project. The popularity of the guide (and requested by many) has prompted us to continue with the next most important topic of creating an effective website, ie SEO - Search Engine Optimization (SEO is also used interchangably with Search Engine Optimizer). In short, seo is the process of improving your website ranking in search engines so that people can find your site more easily.

Search engine optimisation is a very competitive area and as you can see, if you search for this term in major search engines, you can see evidence of many websites trying to compete and outsmart each other. That also implies that many people have realised the power of the internet and want be quickly available when someone searches for something related to their business.
To rank well in major search engines, you need to put in alot of hardwork and do alot of research. The ranking algorithm changes rapidly for major search engines, so you have to keep yourself updated as well.
The Search Process - An Introduction
When you search for something in Google for example, google has to match your sentence against all the websites in its database and display the most relevant results in priority. So, what makes the search engine think that site A is more relevant than site B? There are a number of important factors:

a) Content
If your searched term occurs somewhere in the web page, it means that the webpage is relevant to what you are looking for. This includes the occurence of the searched term in your url, title, meta tags, body... etc. Personally, I think that taking url into seo consideration is stupid. If google is not popular, who could have know that google.com is a search engine URL? In other words, I don't think that a url like americansearchengine.com should benefit more than ase.com in terms of seo for example. I do think that this will be changed in the future.

b) Link Popularity
If alot of websites link to you, it means that there is something worthwhile in your site for people to know.

c) Authority Link
If a highly respected website links to you, it means that your website is more trustworthy and important. Google PR is meant to do that but because it has been highly manipulated, it is no longer as important.

d) Domain Age
If your website(URL) is old, it means that your site is established and the information you provide is more likely to be trusted.

e) Broken Links
If there are alot of broken links (dead links) in your website, it means that you don't really care about your site and content. Why should the search engine spider keep trying to follow the broken links? It is known that MSN Bot is really particular about this issue.

f) Update Frequency
If your website is always updated, it means that you care to provide fresh information for your visitors and therefore, the search spiders should crawl your site more frequently.

g) Duplicated Content
Why should the search engines value your website if what you do is to copy whole chunk of information from other sites? This is a problem with many article hosting site because alot of content are duplicated elsewhere. Something to note when doing article submission but we will not go into details here.

h) Coding Standard
This is probably the least important because not many websites have inappropriate codes that actually stops the search engines from crawling the web pages. Unless your webpages have really ugly code like those generated by microsoft office...etc, it will not pose a big problem for the search engines.
Different search engines emphasis on different factors and there are probably some other ranking factors not listed here. Base on our own experience, it seems that content is coming up top at the moment and hence you see the term "Content Is King" appearing in many places. One thing to note is that alot of the factors mentioned above can be manipulated easily. For example, the most popular technique to increase your link popularity is to buy link packages, perform link exchanges, text link advertising... etc. Search engine companies are trying very hard to stop people from manipulating search results but it will be no easy task.
Where Do I Start
You might want to have a quick browse at our Search Engine Optimisation section for a start.

Step1: Keywords Matching
If you search for "website reviews" for example, how does the search engine know that sitecritic.net is relevant to website reviews? The answer lies in keywords matching. As mentioned in the How To Choose Keywords section (check it out if you haven't), this is the most important and often neglected step.
As mentioned before, typo errors can sometimes be good. "utube.com" actually benefits from the traffic of "youtube.com", "goole.com" from google.com and so on... At the time of writing, goole.com has a good alexa ranking but doesn't really have any content. Why would people want to visit goole.com? It is obviously due to typo. Incidentally, sitecritic.net contains alot of typos as well and I believe some are real (hint to the webmaster) and some for seo reasons?

Step2: Advertise Your Website
One important ranking factor is to have good amount of relevant web pages linking to you. There are a few places to submit or advertise your links for a start: Web Directories, Forums, Blogs... etc. The whole idea is to get links pointing to your website / webpages. If you are paying for advert, try to look for a website that is related to yours. This area has been heavily discussed in many seo sites and forums and probably deserve an article by itself altogether.
Many people ignore graphics altogether when doing search engine optimization. Remember that google has a "Search By Image" option? If you give proper names and alt tags to your images, you will be amazed by how much traffic you can get out of it. Video is a big thing now - proper investment in this area can bring in good amount of links and reap great benefits.
There is also a social book marking fever at the moment with stumbleupon and technorati leading the pack. If you have cool content and can get your website exposed to many readers, they might link to you for free. This technique is also known as link baiting.

Step3: Monitor Results (Focus on GYM)
Check your web statistics frequently (most host will have some cool web stats software such as awstats and webalizer installed). Find out what pages are more popular or successful for certain searched term. Focus on the 3 major search engines in this order (Google, Yahoo, MSN). Based on experience, you can ignore the rest because they often constitute minimal amount of traffic. As different search engines emphasis on different seo factor, ranking well for each one of them will require slightly different technique. This again requires a separate article by its own.

Step4: Be Updated
If you are serious about SEO, it is important to enrich yourself with the latest SEO news by visiting popular search engine sites and forums. For example, Google might announce tomorrow that Google PR is no longer available. What will you do if that happens? How will this impact your website?
Like human beings, Search engines are evolving and getting smarter everyday with Google leading by a great margin. Although internet searching seems to be cool at the moment, there are still a number of critical issues that has yet been resolved - The most notable one is the incorporation of web 2.0/3.0 technologies into the search engine ranking algorithm. With the use of AJAX, search engines have no way to uniquely identify a web page because the content refreshes in the same url. We strongly advise against the use of such technologies if you want your website to be "visible" by the major search engines. Everything that "is" for today might not be the same for tomorrow. That is why it is impotant to keep yourself updated with the latest changes in web technologies.
Conclusion
Don't think that search engine optimisation is a difficult subject. It is based on pure logic. If you encounter a new SEO technique that claims to work, always fall back on the basics:

Question: "What does a search engine do?"
Answer: "To deliever the most relevant non-manipulated results based on the searched term."
Question: "Does this new technique try to manipulate the results?"
If the answer is yes, then it will most likely not work in the long run. Maybe you want short term solution?

At the moment, only human beings can truly tell if a web page is manipulated for search engines or not. Millions of dollars are poured into technologies that can help to identify genuine valuable websites or web pages. In the near future, SE robots should be more human-like and are able to produce search results that are free from human manipulation. That is why many search engine optimizers emphasis on natural writing and natural linking techniques.
We hope you enjoy reading our "How To Improve Search Engine Rankings" guide. We believe there are many more areas not covered and might need improvement. Do send us feedback if you feel like commenting. Happy seoing.