When people use a search engine to locate a web site, they type typically in one or more words phrases that describe the site they are looking for. These words are colloquially referred to as “Keywords”. To be clear, a keyword is not a numeric reference to the number of words that a user types into a search engine, but rather it refers specifically to the totality of what people type into the search engine as their search request.

Figure 1-1
See how "Telephone System" is the "keyword" being searched.
There are 143,000,000 pages which have that keyword in their web content.

When the user gets a search engine results page (SERPs) in response to the query, the SERP contains a list of web sites that most closely match the keywords. Each engine has a different logic which accounts for the different results you see from engine to engine. This logic – otherwise known as the search algorithm - is the secret sauce that explains why one web site appears higher than another in the list of results.

The search engine spiders (these are robot like software scripts that cruise the web going from link to link and reporting back what they find to the mothership) use their own proprietary algorithms to determine how your content relates to the keywords being searched and they come up with a scale to produce the rankings you see online.

Though algorithms are constantly changing, the last few years of SEO tactics suggests strongly that there are two primary ways that will continuously influence your ranking results:

Have content on your site that contains the keywords or related keywords that people are typing into the search engines. If you don’t have web pages with these well-chosen keywords and phrases on your Web site, the odds will increase exponentially that the search engines will not list your site in their results and your site will not be found in any search queries.

Have numerous and relevant links from other web sites to your site. The quality and quantity of links affects the ranking power of your site in two ways. First, some engines (like Yahoo at this time) just like to see a very high number of sites linking to yours. Secondly, the engines measure the quality and relevance of the site linking to you and the content of the link text used to link to your site. So if a site linking to yours is in the same industry (ie. It has similar content to you), that is a point in your favor. As well, if the actual link to your site uses a keyword you are targeting you get another point. This link text by the way is called “anchor text”. While I’m mentioning this I might as well point out that it helps as well to vary the anchor text because if all the anchor text is the same on these inbound links (that means links pointing to your site) then the search engines start deducting points because the links start to look artificial.