Ah, the wacky world of the search engines. It is not an unfair statement to say that a good ranking in the top search engines will drive more business your way than you can handle. Keeping the masses at your site and actually closing the deal is something we talk about in our other articles. Today, we are going to discuss the secrets to getting higher rankings and the myths about search engines that are simply not true.

Secrets Revealed
1. Content, content, content
The best search engines got to be the best search engines by delivering sites that best matched their users' search. Why would you use a search engine that returned bad results? So the search engines use complex algorithms to find the best matches.

The more content on your site - that is text in HTML, not images or flash - the more the search engines will have to collect about your site and the more likely you will find yourself on the top of their rankings. Every word you are reading on this page has been indexed by the major search engines and because there are so many words, this page has a better chance of finding its way on a search engine list then a similar page with less words.

More importantly though, the web is a great big community and if you really want to succeed out there, you need to have something to offer the rest of the community.

2. Link popularity
Just when you thought high school was over and popularity didn't matter anymore. One of the top factors in high rankings is link popularity. Link popularity is simply how many other sites in the web community link to your site. These sites have to also be indexed with the search engine you are indexed with. The more popular the other sites are, the better for you.

The idea here is that popular sites will only link to other relevant sites so the search engine algorithm naturally places these linked sites higher in their rankings. The more links you have to your site on popular sites, the better off you are.

Not only that, you are also going to get visitors from those sites. Sometimes, one well placed link can generate all the traffic you need.

3. Popularity
This one is a catch-22. The more people who visit your site, the higher you will be ranked in the search engines and the more people will visit your site. Popularity online takes time and comes from good, useful content and lots of well placed links.

4. Time
Don't expect good rankings overnight. This stuff takes time and hard work. You will need to re-index your site often and when content is added. Visit the tools section for some good registration tools.

5. Nuts and Bolts
What about meta-tags? And page titles? And alt tags? More about those in the next section on myths.