Search engine optimization is one of most popular online marketing tool for any website. With more websites coming online every day the competition gets larger, so you have to make sure you can out SEO them before they out do you. In this article I will tell how to increase your ranking and how to out do your competition.

Search engines change their algorithms often and it's hard to keep up for anyone, so if you don't know much about SEO don't worry, I will get you up to speed. First make sure YOUR site is robot FRIENDLY by using HTML instead of flash and use more text than images or flash.

Page size can help you rank better in search engines, by keeping your page size low you will help robot(s) get more out of your web page. You should Keep it under 100k, but it's best to keep it around 25k or lower. Content is a key because search engines like Google love theme sites. Build three pages of content per week with at least 200 words.

One thing that every one that owns a site should have heard about by now is link popularity. Link building is very important because not only will search engines find your site faster, but it will help you rank higher for the keywords you used in the links. Try to trade links with websites which have high Google PageRank of at least 4, the more the better, but don't trade links just for PageRank, look at Traffic more. Below is a link to a link exchange that will help you build you link popularity and traffic.

Density and position play a big part in your ranking for your keywords. You should use your keyword once in the title, once in the description meta tag, once the in the heading, once the in the URL, once in bold text. Try to get a density between 5% and 20% and you should do good.

Submit your home page and maybe a few other pages in your site to the search engines, than wait for them to come to your web site. The waiting part is the harder part after you submit to the search engine. You can see the main search engines that you should submit to below.

Google - http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Yahoo - http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

Teoma/Ask Jeeves - You will need to email Teoma to get in at this time.

Meta tags are not that important as they once were, but some search still consider them and this could help you rank higher in some search engines. Use the keyword meta tag and description meta tag, the rest don't do nothing nor help!

After the robots start coming to your site watch the logs (If you have logs) very closely and keep up with what pages they index and how often they come. Also make sure robots are crawling the full site and not just some pages.

Matt Colyer is the owner of the Marhen.com Network and is a part-time SEO. He also is a php, CGI and ASP developer.