A great Web site is only as profitable as the exposure it gets. Your products and services no matter how superior will not be noticed if your site does not improve its search engine ranking. There are over 1 billion pages on the Internet today. How do you make yours stand out? Here are some basic guidelines.

What you need to work on to make your site rank high

Studies show that a whopping 90 percent of Internet users depend on search engines for information, and that 93 percent of them only look at the three top search result pages. If your site does not rank high for relevant keywords and search strings, your customer will never find you.

Fortunately, improving search engine ranking is not rocket science there are basic tactics which, when followed closely, can significantly boost your sites standing. Here are some of them:

Content. Its one thing to lure a user into your site, and its another thing to keep him or her coming back (and maybe even get him or her to refer you). Prioritize your content make it relevant, informative, and easy to read. Remember that most of the fundamentals of search engine algorithms use page content to rank Web sites. Also, popular directories only list sites with sensible content.

Links. The more Web sites that link to you, the better you rank. Use your networking skills to talk to the Webmasters of related sites so that they could link you back. Most search engines count the number of links to your site (your internal page links don't count), while some use more complicated programs to determine the relevancy of the links, compute for your popularity score, and rank you accordingly. So do not just link to any site be sure that the site is valid and respected.

General optimization techniques. Of course, good old fashioned title tags, meta tags, and optimized keyword density are also considered by search engines when they score pages. You don not need a master programmer to do this for you just have automated tools made, and you yourself can already tweak your site.