The internet is the fastest growing information medium in the world today, with an approximated 200 million everyday users worldwide. It is no surprise, therefore, that competition is fierce, and companies are under large amounts of pressure to ensure that through all of the information available, theirs is the most prominent. It is no small task.

The main problem facing most site owners is how on earth to ensure their site is listed in a search engine results page, especially when there could potentially be millions of pages all containing the same phrase that has been entered into the search. The first step is to make sure you thoroughly research both the domain name, to make sure it is unique and easy to spell/remember, and also the key words or phrases you want to put in the title tag. The company name should always appear here, as well as a small description of the goods/service being provided. This is so that anyone searching for the specific company will get the required results, but also if someone searches the particular product/service being offered, this will come up with that same company in the search results.

Backlinks are also a good indication for the search engines to see how popular a website is, and it helps them to determine the ranking for that particular site. A backlink itself can be described as any link received by a web page/site/directory from another web page/site/directory. They enable the company to keep track of what other websites are providing links back to them, and the more there are, the stronger the search engine ranking is likely to be. The difficulty is generating them. A well built webpage should naturally gain backlinks, but it would be naive to simply rely on naturally evolving links by themselves. Popular ways to generate extra backlinks include through directories, forums, web logs, and article directories. However, using sites owned/maintained by the same organization to provide extra links is not an accepted way of making new links, and will not help with search engine rankings. It is worthwhile abiding by the rules set my the major search engines, because they can and will ban any sites suspected of improper practice, such as using link farms and other spam related methods.

The age of a domain name also holds a fair amount of weight in most search engine's ranking systems. The longer a domain name has been in service with a site attached, the more likely it is to be a reputable, successful and heavily trafficked site. The search engine can also check aspects such as when it was last updated and/or had new content added. Those domain names which disappear almost as quickly as they surfaced are more suspect, and likely to be involved in some form of spamming, and so will be discounted in the rankings. Google, for example, has a period whereby it does not even consider the site for ranking until it has been on the web for at least three to four months.