Undoubtedly the answer is ?search engines?. And the equation is very simple ? improve search engine rank and gain more visitors.



To rank high in the result pages you need to satisfy the search engines about your worth and at the same time you must satisfy the existing visitors in your page.

Now, how does search engine get satisfied about the worth of a website for specific keywords (you must remember that search engines are bound to offer good result to retain the existing visitors in their own page)?

Bigger search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, puts more value on content (keyword density, variables and positioning) and incoming links. Whereas, smaller search engines (general category) still emphasizes on Meta keywords and Meta descriptions. (Perhaps you know that in the earlier stages of their development all search engines checked the Meta data to confirm the relative worth of a website.)

Black Hat search engine optimizers used to write different content for search engines and visitors. One of the most common formats was to provide two layers of content. In one layer the content was stuffed with keywords (or only keywords) and was written in the same color as the background (white text on white background) ? naturally the content was not visible to general visitors. At the same time they used to create natural content for visitors. They used so many other techniques to forge content in a page.

However, over the time bigger search engines became too claver to identify those pages and banned them. In fact Google took thousands steps forward and introduced LSI (latent semantic indexing ? any doubt about its introduction?) to identify quality content from original sources.

Today the best way to get better search engine rankings is to stay honest or follow the age old and proven process of pretending that you are honest. What does it mean ? you must go for link building and at the same time make sure those search engines do not understand that you are doing that.

Here are some tips for on-page optimization to improve your search engine ranking:

1. Content ? the primary condition is to have unique content in your site. To put it simply unique content means something that should not have any other similar web copy. Now you need to put your keywords strategically into the body of the content. The best way is to put keywords in sub headings (if you can break the content into different parts or sections, you can have more options to use sub headings). However, make sure that you do not follow any pattern in using key phrases. You can also make some keywords bold (bold words suggest that you are emphasizing on the text). It is always better to update your content occasionally.

2. Interlinking ? Link the important landing pages from different pages with targeted keywords. It not only helps search engines to understand why you created that page but also help them to crawl internal pages.

3. Navigation - Use simple (html) navigation link pattern.

4. Meta Documents ? even though major search engines tend to ignore them, meta documents still have a lot of importance among second level search engines. And in SEO, every little bit counts.

5. URL Structure ? use keywords in the domain name. it is better to structure your URL like "examplesite.com/targeted-keyword/" rather then using "example-site.com/targeted_keyword_positioning_in_url/"

6. Sitemap ? with links to all the internal pages ? helps search engines to easily crawl the website.

7. Good Neighborhood ? Link to worthy websites from your site. This will create a good neighborhood for your site and will help search engines to understand your site better.

And get as many links as possible from relevant websites. If you follow these simple tips, it will improve search engine rank of your website.