Everyone who has a website wants it to rank high in the search engines like Google and Yahoo.

A higher rank means more visitors, and more visitors mean more sales, or more advertising revenue.

If the phrase(s) you're trying to rank well for aren't competitive (that is, few other sites are using the same phrase) then getting good placement is pretty easy: Just put the phrase(s) you want to rank well for in the <title></title> tag and in at least one other area on the page. For some reason this isn't obvious to everyone: I can't remember how many times someone has sought my advice about how to rank well for some phrase, and I check out their page and that phrase is nowhere to be found! A while back a friend asked me how to get her homepage to rank well for her name, which was unusual enough that she should have been at the top of Google with no problems. After I checked out her page I felt like asking her, "And it didn't occur to you to put your name somewhere on that page?!" Actually, her name was on her page, but in a graphic. Google can't read that, they have no idea what words are contained in an image. And her <title> tag just said "Home". How is Google supposed to know that her page was about Sally Thunderpizza? (Not her real name.)

So anyway, for non-competitive phrases, just put the phrases you want to rank for in the <title> and in the body copy of your page. For example, you should be able to get to #1 in Google within a month for the phrase martian pudding headache. Go ahead, try it.

Okay, but what if your phrase is competitive? Then you're going to need to develop some good content for your site, too. Here's the complete recipe:

• Write a <TITLE></TITLE> tag for each page that accurately describes that page (no more than about 64 characters).
• Try to create two new pages every week. If you can't do that, try to do one page each week. At a bare minimum, create a new page each month.
• As much as possible, your new pages should be unique, interesting, authoritative, and compelling.If you want to rank well for the phrase electric widgets, then make your site the best resource about electric widgets available.
• Make sure all of your pages are accessible through normal <A HREF> links (i.e., don't use JavaScript or Flash links exclusively).
• Link to quality relevant sites. After you do so, ask those sites to link to you, but don't make your link to them contingent on whether they link back.
• Follow standard website design tips and avoid the problems listed on Problem Websites. Your site should be not only attractive, but super-easy to use, and completely free of annoyances.
• Most importantly, purge your mind of trying to think of ways you can "trick" your way to the top of the results. Do NOT think about the specific nuts and bolts of how a search engine will rank your pages. Instead, build good, quality pages for your visitors, and trust that the rankings will follow.

But many webmasters don't get this. They write to me asking such things as:

• How many times should my keywords appear on my pages?
• What's the optimum ratio of keywords to non-keywords?
• Should I seek links from several PR4 sites or one PR6 site?
• Will doing "X" cause me to rank higher?

Such webmasters are missing the point. You get good rankings by building a quality site, not by trying to figure out exactly how the search engines rank pages. It's counter-intuitive, but you get good rankings by ignoring rankings and focusing on quality. Focus on quality and the rankings will follow. It works the same way in business: If you focus on the money you'll probably make less money. But if you focus on creating a great customer experience then the money will follow.

But many of you came here hoping to find tricks, so before you dismiss that, consider this: Your site doesn't rank as well as mine, otherwise you wouldn't be here. You want your site to rank better, which is why you went looking for this article. And my site does rank well, which is why you found it. In other words, I know what I'm talking about. My sites are all over Google and Yahoo for a variety of popular terms. When I tell you the best way to get good rankings is to ignore rankings and focus on building your site, it's not just theoretical, and it's not a cop-out: It works, and it works well.

But maybe you figure that you don't have time to build a quality site, so that's why you want some easy tricks. In that case, your site doesn't deserve to rank well. And don't be surprised when it doesn't. If you want better rankings, you must make your site worthy of those rankings. Look at the sites that are beating you. Assuming you already have good <title> tags, is your site truly better than the ones which are beating you? If yes, then you'll probably outrank them eventually. If not, then why are you even trying to get the search engines to give preferential treatment to an inferior site? Make your site better than the rest, and the rankings will follow.

One problem with using tricks is that the effects are temporary. Put yourself in Google's shoes: Do you want to list the verybest sites or do you want to list the ones that are most adept at employing tricks? Obviously you hate tricksters because when you return a list of crappy sites instead of the very best ones then that reflects poorly on you. So you do everything in your power to weed out the tricksters. As soon as webmasters start using some trick, you change your calculations to ignore that trick. The algorthims are secret, and they're always changing to boot. (About six changes a week, according to the NY Times.) As a webmaster, obviously your time is better spent making your site better than screwing around playing cat-and-mouse games with the search engines.

Many webmasters also can't see the forest for the trees. Google wants them to create quality pages which have certain attributes. Many webmasters mistakenly focus on those attributes rather than the quality of the page. Here's a good analogy: Years ago scientists found that people who ate more fruits and vegetables and less meat and dairy were much healthier and lived longer, and noted that fruits and vegetables are low in fat. The proper response then would be to eat more fruits and vegetables. But instead Americans started eating processed low-fat junk food instead, which didn't do them any good. Google doesn't want you to fill your pages with crap in hopes of impressing them, nor do they want you to get links from any and everybody. Google wants you to build a high quality website. Why would they want anything else?

As Google says on its philosophy page, "Focus on the user and all else will follow." Google wants webmasters to feel the same way -- that if you build the best site possible, your good rankings will follow. This isn't the answer that most webmasters want to hear. They want a few simple "tricks" that will rocket them to the top of the SERPs. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. Even if that were possible, twenty sites all employing the same tricks couldn't all fit on the front page of Google.

People seek out my advice about search rankings because they know my sites rank well for a whole host of search phrases. And I promise you I didn't do anything special beyond what's listed above. I certainly didn't worry about keyword density, META tags, submitting my site to the engines, reciprocal link requests, or any other nonsense. I simply tried to build quality sites. In fact, early on I didn't even consider my search rankings. I just built good sites and then noticed that they ranked well. Really well.

So what attributes does a page need to be considered "quality" by a search engine? The same things it would need to impress most of us, such as:

• The page is relevant to the terms being searched for
• The page is considered an authority about its topic
•  
•  The page has good, useful content
• The page has been around for a while
• The page is part of a site with lots of information
•  
•  The page loads quickly
• The page doesn't have a bunch of broken links
• The page isn't filled with a cheap list of keywords

So ranking well generally means:

• Creating many fast-loading, content-rich pages, with the words you want to rank for on the page and in the <TITLE> tag, and
• Getting links to your pages from other sites, especially from pages similar in content

Truth be told, that is 90% of it right there. Of course there are more details, and that's why there's thirteen pages of explanation that follow, but the summary above is SEO in a nutshell. Honest.

Here's more about what the engines consider high quality vs. low quality, according to what they recommend in their guidelines.

 Notice what they do NOT say:

• Make sure to "submit" your site, even though the search engines will almost certainly find it anyway.
• Waste your time META tags for every page.
• Obssess over keyword density.
• Annoy other webmasters with requests for reciprocal links

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