One of the simplest ways to improve your site's placement in the search engine results is to work on the keyword density on your page. Generally speaking, keyword density is the ratio of the word that is being searched for (the keyword) against the total number of words appearing on your web page. If your keyword occurs only (say) once in a page of one thousand words, it has a lower keyword density than a keyword that occurs (say) four times in a page of similar length.

Most search engines handle words and simple phrases. In its simplest form, text search looks for pages with lots of occurrences of each of the words in a query, stopwords aside. The more common a word is on a page, compared with its frequency in the overall language, the more likely that page will appear among the search results. Hitting all the words in a query is a lot better than missing some.
Search engines also make some efforts to “understand” what is meant by the query words. For example, most search engines now offer optional spelling correction. And increasingly they search not just on the words and phrases actually entered, but the also use stemming to search for alternate forms of the words.Teoma-based engines are also offering refinement by category, ala the now-defunct Northern Light. However, Excite-like concept search has otherwise not made a comeback yet, since the concept categories are too unstable.

1. High up on the page
2. In headings
3. In BOLDFACE (at least in Inktomi)
4. In the URL
5. In the title (important)
6. In the description
7. In the ALT tags for graphics.
8. In the generic keywords metatags (only for Inktomi, and only a little bit even for them)
9. In the link text for inbound links.

Many will say that there are no rules to search engine optimization, they might be right, but the fact remains that webmasters can influence their search engine ranking through the tips above. Attempting to trick or fool the search engines is a sure fire way to become banned. Search engines have the ability to provide a consistent and steady stream of traffic to websites, that stream can become a trickle if you attempt to deceive.

Search engine ranking algorithms are closely guarded secrets, for at least two reasons: search engine companies want to protect their methods from their competitors, and they also want to make it difficult for web site owners to manipulate their rankings.

The base case is that spiders crawl the entire Web, starting from known pages and following all links, and also crawling pages that are hand-submitted. Google is pretty much like that still. If a site has high PageRank, it is spidered more often and more deeply.

However, search engines are trying to encourage site owners to pay for the privelege of having their pages spidered. Teoma's index is very hard to get into without paying money, and Inktomi's isn't that easy either. And even if you do get into Inktomi for free, they'll take a long time to respider, while if you pay they respider constantly. One advantage of being respidered often is that you can tweak your page to come up higher in their relevancy rankings, then see if your changes worked.

Finally, you can also pay to appear on a search page. That is, your link will appear when someone searches on a specific keyword or keyphrase. Google does a good job of making it pretty clear which results (at the top or on the right of the page) are paid; others maybe do a not-so-good job.

Paid search results are typically all pay-per-click, based on keyword. The advertiser pays the search engine vendor a specific amount of money each time an ad is clicked on, this fee having been determined by an auction of each keyword or keyphrase.

Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

Cloaking

Cloaking a website is a stealth technique used to provide a copy of a web page to search engines while providing an alternate copy to website visitors. The website copy provided to the search engine is optimized and not always reflective of the real content contained on the webpage.

Hidden Text

Another deceptive tip that will result in a search engine ban, is done by incorporating text into a website that is not visible to the naked eye, but is visible to search engine spider. There are two ways that underhanded webmasters might attempt this, the first is by changing the font color to match the web page's background color. The second fallacious way of deceiving the search engine using hidden text is by using a single character like a '.' period as a link. Black hat webmasters might attempt this as a way to increase their websites link popularity.

Bad Links

While this is not as much a deceptive practice as an indication that the webpage content has been abandoned, links to webpages that no longer exist is an indication to search engines that the content is no longer relevant.

Lack of Meta Tags

A website that does not make use of title and description tags, will not result in a ban but could impact the ability for a website to rank well. The title and description of a website should be different on each and every web page.

Navigation Mistakes

Navigation should be "spiderable". Do not use javascript or flash navigation, search engines can not spider javascript menus. Adding a site map link is just not good enough, if you do not use conventional navigational techniques, the pages within your website will not always be indexed by the search engines. Navigation should be logically structured, links should not be hidden too deeply within the website or the content contained on the buried pages will not be considered relevant and will not rank well.

Valid Code

Observing the conventions of HTML are a necessity, if a webpage's code is invalid, search engines might 'choke' and be unable to follow the links or code. Be sure to properly open and close all HTML code. Valid HTML is critical.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is a technique where a long list of repetitive keywords, sometimes related sometimes unrelated to the webpages content is used to trick search engines into thinking the webpage is relevant. Rarely is this effective and it is unlikely that it will artificially inflate a websites ranking for any length of time.

Avoid Session IDs

Webpages within a website that uses session IDs or "ID=" in the links will not always be recognized by search engines. It is assumed by many search engines that when ID= appears in the URL, that the webpage does not contain unique content and that the webpage is not in need of indexing. Avoid using ID= on dynamic or static web pages.

Nice Neighbors

Avoid listing the website in link farms. Search engines are firm believers that you are like the company that you keep, links should be solicited from reputable sources. Links from spammy websites will not help a website rank well.