Today Search Engines have complete control over where users go on the web. There are many varieties of search engines, however, no matter whether their generic or specialized users always get directed toward relevant websites in the fastest, most efficient manner.

It's become more and more prominent for web developers to concentrate more on search engines and user traffic. In order to improve rankings on search engines you have to have a strong knowledge of how they work.

How Search Engines Work:
Search engines gather their listings by either having a web developer submit the sites, or by using what's called a web crawler. A web crawler is a software robot that goes through the web and takes snap shots of site, then index's them into their directory. Search engines which are indexed manually are of course far harder to manipulate, however, these engines are being replaced by the spider-indexed search eninges (google, yahoo, msn, alta vista, etc.). How your page is indexed depends on which methods the web developer used, it's very important to have text links, and paragraphs of content related toward your site on the first page.

Keywords are just as important as your text links and contented related paragraphs, these keywords decide how your site is indexed on the search engines. Each time a spyder comes by your site it detemines the keywords people will search for by how many times it comes across certain words related to your site. The words that appear most often are more significant to the search engine therefore it's placed higher in the listings. It's very important to know the keywords on your site and understand which phrases and keywords users will search for so you can judge which words to use. A very useful way to find the right keywords and phrases for your site is to use keyword research software, these programs will take your most popular keyword, or whatever word you enter and give you a large selection of related keywords and tell you how often that words used to give you an idea of your competition.

It's a very good idea to have a keyword every 12 words of text on each page. By doing this your making your keywords higher ranking on the search engines. The Meta tags each page is also very important to pay attention to because many search engines use those keywords instead to do the indexing, these include the "Title" and "Description" tags. It's also a good idea to have a seperate title tag for each page, ex. youcompany: About, yourcompany: Services, etc....

Graphics can help keep visitors wihin your site, however, they can also create a reverse effect, if you have too many graphics visitors won't want to wait around for it too load, so to make sure this doesn't become a problem use graphics only where they're required, most sites have a graphic where it could be a bgcolor, make sure you keep design with standards in mind when develping a web page. If you use flash make sure you have an alternative link for an html spider friendly version.

Site submission is a very important part of aspect of page rank. You can either manually submit you site, or use a program to automatically submit you site to hundreds of search engines, if you manually submit your site you know your getting the rank, automatic submission is never a guarantee and could possibly cause the search engines to consider your site as spam, so to stay safe always try to manually sumbit your site. When you do this make sure to submit each page on your site, this may be time consuming but it will help your page rank in the end.

Having other sites link back to yours will bring your position up on search engines. You can do this by either requesting a link on their site, or having a link exchange with the other site. You must make sure the sites your having link back to yours is in some way related to your site, for instance if it's a design studio, have other design studios and design portals link back to your site. If the sites linking back aren't in any way related to yours this won't help.