And you let me decide whether to weigh heavily exact matches, if I know exactly what I am looking for, or approximate matches if I know only that itchy splotches come from some rare Polar virus transmitted by stampeding trans-Atlantic penguins.

I even get to choose to boost rankings for popular sites or, if I'm feeling like a rebel, for less popular sites. Yes, you have even appealed to my deepest psychological mood swings. This is really cool.

But what really counts is this: I control MSN!

I can just imagine TV ads you have already planned: The ad character (a student, a construction worker, a nurse?) says, "Move over Bill Gates, I'm in charge now." The voiceover says, "Search MSN" PageRank will taste like yesterday's chewing gum.

I decided to find out if I really do control MSN, using one of my client sites. I chose Dotcom-Monitor Web Site Monitoring ( http://www.dotcom-monitor.com ) and search term "website monitoring". As I write, site sits at #3 for that search term.

I turbo charged popularity lever to 100%. Whoa. Dotcom-Monitor lost a spot. What does that mean? Somebody who does not rank as highly as my client got a boost by weighing link popularity higher (and, by extension, on-page content lower).

This tells me that my client's on-page content is in good shape. It also tells me which competitor has best backlinks to check out.

PageRank was an effective gimmick for wrapping webmasters and SEO consultants around Google's fingers. But this results ranking thingy could wrap both public and webmasters around MSN's fingers.

Just one word of advice, Bill. Results Ranking? Is that catchiest moniker you could give it?

Bill, you are to be congratulated for devising such a clever marketing tool, and for purposefully leaving it right out in open like a live grenade without even a hint that it is there. That is what you did, isn't it? You did do it on purpose, didn't you?

If not, please let me know, so I can send you my invoice for your next great marketing idea.

Unique titles for all your pages

Search engines pay a lot of attention to content in a page's title and this should describe exactly what page is about. As mentioned above, try and include your keywords in page title and then give page a heading title that matches or is very similar to page title and include it in a H1 /H1. If you don't like appearance of text within a H1 you can format text style within your css document.

External Links

All major search engines place a high premium on this and therefore so should you! Actively seek good links from websites in same interest area as your site. The more important site better as search engines will place a higher value for a link from an "authority" site than from for a link from a less popular site. Make sure that in your link text you include your keywords rather than just name of your site. For example, if your site is about sauce pans, put "Buy Sauce Pans" instead of 2www.saucepanheaven.com".

Create search engine friendly url's

This can have a huge effect on number of pages of your site that will be indexed. A lot of search engines steer away from indexing pages that have a lot of parameters. We've all seen them. www.somesite.com/article.php?id=32&category=2 and such things. Some search engines will stop when they see a ? and therefore it won't be able to see all content in site.

One way around this problem is through a method called mod_rewrite. I am not going to cover mod_rewrite in this article as it is too large a topic to cover within scope of this article but a lot of articles can be found that teach you how do this. To summarise, it is a server side tool that converts above url to something like www.somesite.com/article/32/2. This page can now be indexed along with every other article in site. I would highly recommend looking into this as in my experience it has given me best return.

Conclusion

If you follow these steps you'll quickly start to see your website popularity grow. Sometimes you have to go through trial and error, especially when choosing keywords but effort you put in will be returned as search engines start to pick up on your improvements and start directing more traffic to you. We'll be covering a lot of these topics in much greater detail in coming articles so be sure to check back for more valuable advice.