Most search engines today, and especially Google, pay little if any attention to a site’s meta tags and do not use them in their rankings process. Google in fact does not even look at them. For too long people stuffed their keywords and description tags with all kinds of irrelevant keywords. But even still there are some reasons why you would still want to make sure that they are filled out correctly.

You know that you need links to your site in order to achieve high rankings in the search engines. But where your links point to is just as important as how many links to get. If all of your links are pointed to your homepage you could be fighting an uphill battle and putting all of your eggs in one basket.

There is no doubt that showing up on page one of Google for a highly competitive term like “Real Estate” would be awesome. Your site would be flooded with so much traffic you would not know what to do with it all. But there are a couple of problems with targeting such a huge keyword phrase. It may not be the right kind of traffic and it may not be worth the time it would take to rank for it.

It can be very easy to try and reinvent the wheel when it comes to trying to get your site to page one of the search engines. You can spend hours on end looking for places that you can get a link to point back to your site. There is, however, an easier way and the search engines themselves will give you the answers to what links are going to be the best for you.

Top search engine rankings are primarily driven by the links that point to a particular website but just as important to take into consideration is the anchor text that is being used for your link. Too often people will use their name or company name as their link. This will get you to page one but usually for terms that most people are not searching for. The right anchor text is going to make a big difference in your site’s traffic.

Building links to your website is by far the most important activity you can do in order to achieve high rankings on the most popular search engines. But many people tend to focus on quantity by going out and doing link exchanges or by submitting the same article to a ton of article directories. This will get you a lot of incoming links however the quality of the links you are getting is going to do more for your rankings than shear quantity.

In this series we are going to be take a look at how search engine work and what they are looking for in order to get top (page 1) rankings in the search results. We will be going over the most popular search engines individually but the basic principles are the same for all of them.

I see it time and time again. Someone trying to optimize their website for whatever keyword phrase and trying to think of ways to beat Google. They are thinking that they need "x" amount of link exchanges and "x" amount of directory listings or that their keyword density needs to be "this" for Google to give them the all important page 1 rankings in the search engine results.

A recent blog post by The Forrester Blog talks about how to dramatically increase your Google rankings by using video content such as YouTube. Search engines, and Google is ahead of the others on this, have started to blend their search results to include images, video, maps and news along with the standard search results. This has given sites multiple ways and opportunities to sites to rank highly in the search results but few have taken advantage of this.