Your website's page rank on Google and Yahoo! is directly affected by how well the site is optimized for the search engines. If your site does not employ Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, it is unlikely to appear in the search engines for any remotely competitive terms. Search engine optimization strategies can be further broken down into two main categories: On-Site Optimization and Off-Site Optimization.
On Site Optimization Basics
On site search engine optimization refers primarily to a website's content, design, and behind the scenes elements. To be effective, your site's content must be original and contain keywords at the appropriate keyword density. Plagiarized or poorly written content will hurt your ranking, as will articles with too many or too few keywords. The website's design should be search engine friendly, clean, and free of any navigational mistakes or errors.
Broken links will reduce your site's page rank, as will poor navigational elements. Finally, the behind the scenes elements of the site must be properly optimized. Title and meta tags, headlines, and page descriptions must include your keywords and accurately describe your site's content.Offsite Optimization Basics
The SEO you do outside of your website is just as important as what you do to the site itself. Google and the other big search engines will determine how "popular" your site is by looking at the number of inbound links to your site. If many other similar sites, especially those who have high page rank, link to your website, the search engines interpret this as a vote of confidence for your site. You can further improve the power of your backlinks by making the url appear as "anchor text" that describes the keywords you want your site to appear for in the search engines. For example, if a popular site linked to your resume help site and made the words "resume help" into the link, this would greatly improve your site's page rank for the keyword phrase "resume help."
Revealed - How to Improve Your Search Engine Rank Today