There are some important points to understand about search engines and how they work. What is it that puts one page at the top of the search results for a particular keyword or phrase while another page sits in position 1000. None of us knows the whole answer to this but we can make some educated guesses.

First we should be aware that it is the PAGE that is put at the top of the search engine results not the website. While it no doubts helps the whole site if it has a popular and successful page the ranking the search engines give is for the page and for the links and references to it from around the web. Some results you see on the search engine pages do seem odd and may make you wonder if there is any point in publishing an interesting webpage full of content that will be of interest to your readers but the majority are interesting and relevant pages of content.

Some people take the view that they do not want anything too interesting because they want their website visitors to click an advert and leave the site. We all want to get an income from having our visitors arrive but if you encourage them to leave straight away you may get a small initial financial benefit but they are unlikely to return to your site if it did nothing for them other then point them to an advert.

They used to say content is king and that you should make pages for your visitors not for the search engines. Both of these sayings remain true but you do need to make allowances for the search engines and try to help them appreciate the value of your page.

META tags are said to be dead but it does no harm to include them. Including your preferred keywords in your text should help the search engines understand the main purpose of your web page and getting lots of backlinks from decent websites will help a lot. How many links do you need? The more the merrier but it does depend on your keywords. If there are millions of pages using the same keywords you are likely to have to get thousands of links to achieve any success at all.

When you put a page of content on your website you should have some sort of an idea what it is for. Is it to help your readers do or understand something or is it simply to satisfy your own ego. Either approach is ok but the first is likely to generate more visitors and have better positioning in the search engine results.

If your visitors appreciate what you have written they are more likely to read other pages on your website and return again in the future. They will increasingly trust what you say and may respond when you reccommend a particular product purchase because they know you are not just selling something for the sake of it.

People do not, in general, like being sold to. The best salesman is not the one who shoves a product in your face and says buy this. The best salesman is your prospective customer who visits your site, likes what they read and sees that you are offering genuine help and support for what they want to achieve.

When people and search engines trust your website you will achieve better results and have happier customers who will return again and again and recommend your site to their friends and colleagues. You will then have a website that can continue working for you and benefiting your customers for years.