photo credit: brentdanleyYour search engine ranking is the position of your website on any particular search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc). Because search engines favor the high-ranking sites, you need to check your search engine ranking continuously and find ways to improve your ranking. There are many free tools that can allow you to do this. Page ranks range from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest (and virtually impossible to achieve). Even a rank of 1 on Google is considered high.

In order to obtain a high search engine rank, you need to employ SEO (search engine optimization) techniques. And this can take a significant amount of time and/or money depending on whether or not you do it yourself of hire someone else to do it. SEO software is also a viable option to consider.

If you’ve decided that you want to be the one to check your search engine ranking yourself, and to take care of the SEO for your website, you’ll need to make a daily habit of performing activities that build incoming links to your website and using the right keywords. Incoming links greatly influence your page ranking. If you can get a high-ranking site to link to your website, you will bypass a great deal of your competition.

However, obtaining these links can often take quite a bit of time and patience. There are several ways to go about this. You can write to other webmasters and ask them to link to you. You can submit your site to online directories. You can do article marketing. You can use a social bookmarking strategy. The list goes on and on. But the most important concept of all is that the information you offer on your site must be valuable. It is much easier to obtain links to your site when you are offering information that your visitors (or other webmasters) find valuable.

Keyword optimizing your site is also part of the SEO strategy, although less important than incoming links. The best ways to go about using the right keywords is to use the free keyword tools offered by all of the search engines. These free keyword tools tell you exactly what people are searching for on the internet.

Check out the words that pertain to the industry and use these words on your website. If you’re just starting out, go with very detailed keywords and not the general highly-searched and highly competitive ones. It’s estimated that about 60% of searches online consist of two to three keywords so try to stick with phrases that fit that. Make sure you use your keyword phrases in important places on your website like titles, headings, sub-headings, etc.

Whether you manage to optimize your website on your own, with the help of a consultant or agency, or with software programs to check search engine ranking, you will see that your position continues to climb and this will bring in more traffic to your website.