There are several aspects to ranking high on search engines, some of which you can directly control, others you cannot. First there are page elements which you can control. Page elements are the content of your web page. The second is external factors such as links pointing in to your website.
Both elements are crucial to the success of your website rankings. It is much easier to control the page content than it is to control inbound links.
In terms of page element to rank higher on search engines it's very important to put your key word(s) once in your page title tag and once in a h1 heading tag. You can use style font commands to make your h1 tag look nice and match with the rest of your page layout. Next it's important to have your outbound links use good anchor text and point to relevant sites. These 'relevant sites' can be sites operating in your field or they can be authority sites such as wikipedia. You may wish to link to competitors using good anchor text. Search engines attribute the keywords in the anchor text of your outbound links to your webpage. It's a good idea to everyday try and get one of your competitors or a site in your field to trade links with you. Either trade links on your main index page or have a resource page where you list your link trades. Do not use the word 'links' to refer to your link trades. Use another phrase such as 'resources' or 'useful sites.'
External inbound links are much more difficult to control. For instance, you can view source your competitors pages for websites which appear in page 1 of Yahoo or Google. You will be able to see your competitors outbound links, but not the inbound links. Both Yahoo and Google have a command to let you see inbound links to a website. For Google enter link:www.websitename.com to check for which sites Google displays as linking in to www.websitename.com Please note that Google only shows a partial list even though Google actually has a larger list of websites linking in. For Yahoo the command is linkdomain:www.websitename.com
You may wish to use the above commands to check links in to your site as well as your competitors. Determining who links where is the easy part. The hard part is to get those websites linking to your competitor to link to your site. There are a few possibilities open to you once you determine which sites you'd like to have link back to you. You may wish to write the webmaster of that site and try to arrange a link trade. You may wish to have excellent content on your site so that 'authority' sites will link to your site. You may wish to submit your site to established directories such as Dmoz.org to build natural links. Or you may wish to pay directories such as Yahoo.com to list your website.
Following the simple website search engine ranking tips above will help your site rank well on all major search engines incluiding Yahoo, Google and MSN. MSN is an increasingly popular search engine, especially since Microsoft Internet Explorer now redirects 404 error traffic to it's MSN Live webpage.
