Time erodes your ranking in search engines. This means you must find ways to improve or maintain your ranking. At times due to pure bad luck a search engine will drop your site from their database. Check your ranking weekly and reregister at least monthly. Every time you slip someone is waiting to take your place.

   Monitor the key phrases people are using to find your site. Most ISP's to date will offer this service for free. For my website, I can find out what words people use, what search engine they used or what link they came from.

Step 1:

   Think about what words your target audience would use to find you. Then take those words and search through the top 10 search engines [Altavista, Excite, AOL, Infoseek, Lycos, Goto, Snap, Hotbot, Canada, Webcrawler, Northern Light]. Take note of who is listed in the first 2 or 3 pages.

    Also, review the sites recommended by that search engine. These are usually listed at the top of the page and not listed in the results.

Step 2:

    Check out their content to see how many times your phrases are used on the page found in that search engine. I recommend that you use that phrase no more than 7 times on the page you will submit to the search engines. You must also view the source code of that page to see what, TITLE, KEYWORDS, DESCRIPTION they have used. [ take note of "alt" tags used to add more keyphrases in images ]

    Make sure the first 100 words on your page uses your key phrase at least 3 times and also use the "alt" tag with your images to add additional key phrases. Step 3:

    Find out who has linked to your competitions websites. To do this go to the following site and type in their URL - http://www.linkpopularity.com or simply in any search engine, type in their URL and disregard any links you find similar to what you've searched for. Some search engines will tell you how to search for links to a specific site and return results without that site listed. After submitting your new and improved site to the search engines, you will then contact these folks to see if they will exchange links with you. Now you will then submit that page from their website where your link is listed. Get the idea. It is called link popularity.

Bonus: Also look to swap links with sites in the top 30 results of a search under your key phrases.

Step 4:

    Submit your site to the affiliates of the search engines. For example, Aol owns Excite. Excite is the default search engine for anyone using Real Player the most popular tool for listening to audio and viewing videos on the internet. Microsoft owns Snap and Newhoo to name a few. So as you can see, submitting to MSN.com and AOLnetfind is a good idea.

Step 5:

    Create a webpage with links to all pages within your website. Why? Search engines use a tool called a spider. It visits your site from whichever page you submit and crawls your website through links found on that page. Basically, if the spiders do what they are supposed to do, then the majority of your site will be indexed. However, it is not a bad idea for you to submit your important pages to the search engines just in case the spider takes a year to reach your site.

Step 6:

    Find specialized search engines that serve your target market and also submit your site there.

Step 7:

    If you can afford it, purchase other domain names and perform the previous steps on your other websites using different key phrases. Make your other websites link to your main website. It is very beneficial to have multiple avenues to our establishment.

Get started with the following links

• http://www.positionagent.com/free.htm
• http://www.rankthis.com/
• http://searchenginewatch.com/