Search engines such as 'Google' and 'Ask Jeeves' are the primary method that people use to find web sites. Achieving a high ranking in these search engines is perhaps the most important way of boosting the number of visitors that your website receives. All websites we develop are created with search engines in mind - we carefully craft our pages so that search engines can easily find and index them. We can also employ the services of an ethical 'search engine optimisation' (SEO) expert to further fine-tune sites so as to achieve high positions.

Many companies advertise that they will submit your website to thousands of search engines every month (for a fee), and they may even claim that this will improve your search engine positioning. In reality, this is unnecessary, inneffective and often over-priced. Search engines will visit your site quite frequently (at least every month, usually more often) whether you submit to them or not. And there are only a few main search engines of any note - many others just get their data from one of these, so submitting to them separately is a waste of time. You only need to re-submit if you have changed your content significantly and don't want to wait for the search engines to pick up the changes automatically. Even then, re-submitting might not make any difference.

Don't be fooled by glowing testemonials from people who pay as much as £20 per month for search engine submission services. The reality is, that if these people stopped paying for re-submission, there would be no effect on their rankings! Many companies who offer these services perform a one-off optimization which is what actually improves the ranking. They then charge their victims every month with the claim that to keep the good results they have to re-submit. These schemes are also often offered through layers of resellers - each taking their share of the money despite doing no work at all.

Of course, there are some small businesses with a limited customer base or that want an online presence simply to provide a service to their existing customers, and they may not be interested in the expense of fine-tuning their site for higher search engine rankings. Others may be on a tight budget and can't afford to invest in the services of an SEO expert. Don't worry though - there are some simple steps you can take to improve your search engine position yourself.

The main influencing factor in the success of your website (at least from a search engine point of view) will be the way it links in with other websites. Every time one website links to another website, it is effectively 'voting' for that site. The more incoming links your site has then, the higher its 'page rank' (PR) - or importance to the likes of Google. If another site which already has a high page rank links to yours, and is relevant to the subject matter of your website, its 'vote' is worth a lot more, thus boosting your own ranking.

In order to get other sites to link to (or 'vote for') yours, you can offer to exchange links with them. These exchanges are called 'reciprocal links'. It is best not to have reciprocal links with other sites that are not related to your line of business, otherwise your page rank could go down. Another excellent way of increasing the number of incoming links is to offer some genuinely useful content that is of real value to visitors. Offering free information or services that are of real interest to your customer base or to others working in your field will significantly improve your chances of persuading others to link to you!

Another important source of incoming links is the plethora of online business directories. Many of these directories will allow you to list your business and website address for free, whilst others will publish your postal address for free, but require payment to actually link to your site. For best effect, make sure your link appears on a listing or category that includes similar businesses to yours - the context of an incoming link is very important to search engines.

Keyword optimization is another area in which you can significantly improve your search engine results. Care must be taken not to over-use keywords in the wrong places, as search engines will spot this and 'blacklist' your site if you are suspected of such 'spamming'. However, you do need to make sure that the first few paragraphs of text on each page of your site are quite densely populated with the keywords and phrases that you want to target. Try to avoid optimizing for very common keywords, as there is so much competition that you are unlikely to achieve good results. Concentrate on multiple-word phrases that are relevant but not too obvious - for example, 'hand made porcelain garden gnomes' is much better than just 'gnomes' or even 'garden gnomes' (assuming that term was relevant to your site of course).

Keyword analysis tools might help you to identify good phrases to target, although some of them can be quite expensive. Another source of ideas is to check what keywords are used by your high-ranking competitors (use the 'view source' or 'view page source' feature of your web browser to see what keywords they list at the top of their page). You can use your chosen keywords in your page titles, headings, keywords 'metatag', and most importantly, the actual text of your web pages. Any additional files such as images can be named using keywords - with hyphens to separate words - and the 'alternative text' for images can also be used for your targeted keyword phrases. When using the 'keywords metatag' though, don't use the same word in more than about 6 different keyword phrases, otherwise search engines may regard you as a 'spammer', and blacklist your site.

Whilst re-submitting your site to search engines every month is not necessary, it is important to keep reviewing your keywords and reciprocal link arrangements to make sure that they are still relevant and active. Trends change, and search engines frequently change their 'rules', so some maintenance work from time to time will help keep your ranking high.

Attracting visitors to your site is all well and good, but how can you encourage visitors to keep coming back? Primarily, by keeping your site content fresh and up-to-date...

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