Although there are many other search engines, Google, Yahoo! and MSN are the top three most used search engines today. In fact, they are practically the only search engines that matter; today, most of the traffic coming into websites are being referred by these search engines. So if you want your website to sell, you better get to the top of search engines ? on top one on page one. Studies have shown that, in general, Internet users only click on the top two search engine results.

Different search engines actually have different algorithms in generating results, but in actual SEO practice, it has been found that you improve your ranking on the search engine results across the three major search engines by keeping the SEO basics in mind, and implementing strategies related to them.

Keyword Density

Search results place a premium on a website's relevance to the keyword being searched for. It is not anymore possible to pull up porn site results on searches for ?best hotels?.

Search engines determine a website's relevance partly through keyword density, which is the percentage of a keyword in the total content of a web page - from a page's meta information (title, description, and keywords) to the actual website copy visible to visitors. Increase your keyword density by writing accordingly, but keep the density from between 3% to 7% or you will risk of being flagged for spamming.

Website copy

Websites are made for a human user, and not for a search engines and its spiders. When your website copy is bad, visitors will click on the BACK button almost as soon as they land.

Bad news, since visitor stay does matter. You rankings decrease when your visitors click on the "back" button within five seconds of landing on your website.

Link building

Link building is all about getting other websites to link to your own. To get the most of link building, put your keywords in the anchor text information you're going to send to the other website.

Anchor text is the text on the other website's that links and points to your website. If you sell coffee beans and you have a link to a seller of coffee maker, put your keywords (like ?coffee beans?) on the anchor text found on the other website.

Frames and Flash

SEO specialists will always advise against using frames and flash in website design. Why? Because the text within them cannot be crawled by search engine spiders.

Visitor Traffic

To increase your ranking in the search engine results is to make active efforts to drive visitors to your site. You can do this by running a Google AdWords campaign or an email campaign. You can also do forums posting, launch an online press release campaign, or write blogs. Make sure though that you put in active http:// links to your website.