Pay-per-click search engine marketing requires you to bid and pay for specific search engine rankings. This can be advantageous in that you can quickly achieve a high response rate. This is helpful in testing ad copy and response rates. However, it is an disadvantageous because you have to pay for every single click. On the other hand, natural search engine rankings take longer to achieve but are less costly, they can never bee 100% free, you always have to have savings up to build your backlinks and market your site.

How do you do this? How do you know what the search engines are looking for? Some top predictors include content in relation to keywords, meta keyword and meta description tags, your site's title and its link popularity. Although meta tags are notm used by most search engines anymore, it does not hurt to include them in your header. You need to know that achieving high search engine rankings for more than a few words on any given web page is very difficult to do. This is why some sites grow so big as different pages are created for each keyword. Of course, the site then has to optimize these pages for the specific keyword that they are trying to achieve search engine rankings for.

Other than that, focus on one main keyword, if you say, for example own a site about "baseball cards", and have subpages that includes "80's baseball cards" and "Babe Ruth baseball cards". It is good to target a few extra keywords for your subpages instead of targeting just "baseball cards". Those keywords are less competitive and will help you gain better rankings.

Optimizing a web page also requires that the writing on the web page contain between a 3% and 5% keyword density. This is the percentage of times you insert your keyword into your writing when compared to the other words that are used. So, if you are creating a site about "volleyball" you will need to make sure that the term "volleyball" is included in your page's title, keywords and description. Then for every 100 words you write, the keyword "volleyball" will need to be used at least three times. Also make sure you use header tags around your targeted keywords. Take the extra step to include an image alt code to your images, these keywords are usually indexedby search engines.

One very important thing to do when you are building a strong natural search engine ranking is to work on increasing your link popularity (the number of web sites that link to your site). This can be done by adding your site to directories, you can even pay someone to do this for you. Trading links with other sites with the same or related content as yours. Update your articles and submit them to various article directories that allow you to place your link in your profile.