Now, you may be thinking that this SEO thing is too easy: you could just manipulate a few page elements and you would be all set. The search engines, however, are smarter than that. To avoid this kind of potential abuse, search engines rely heavily on links from other pages. In a nutshell, more links to your page from quality pages with content related to your site you can get, higher your page will rank. In other words, you can have a great page, but if nobody is linking to it, you will not achieve high search engine rankings.

That's it.

In summary: chose right keywords, utilize them often on your page, and get as many links as you can from quality pages related to your site's content, and you will be on your way to high search engine rankings. The rest is just time and patience.

While goal of this article is just to give you a quick overview of what Search Engine Optimization is, you can further explore this topic by reading this Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization Tutorial. If you found this article useful, you may also want to expand your Search Engine Optimization knowledge by reading Aaron Wall's SEOBook (http://www.accordmarketing.com/seobook/ ).

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Mario Sanchez is a Miami based freelance writer who focuses on Internet marketing and web design topics.  He publishes The Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net ), a growing collection of web design and Internet marketing articles, tips and resources.  You can freely reprint his articles on your website, ezine, or ebook.

Reason 2 - Getting Number 1 on Google Is The Tip Of The Website-Marketing-Iceberg

If you focus on getting Number 1 on Google and nothing else it will never happen. You need to focus on all other elements I mentioned above and especially on developing reciprocal links with other relevant websites. Remember - top website marketing experts in world (who do nothing else but market websites day-in, day-out) only attract around 15% of their website visitors from search engines. This is not because their websites don't have a high ranking in search engines (because they do and many of them will have that elusive Number 1 spot!) - it's because they attract so much more traffic from other places such as directories, associates' websites, reciprocal links etc.

Reason 3 - It's Too Dangerous

When you were a child how many times did you hear following phrase?

"Don't put all your eggs in one basket"

And yet day after day I hear people asking how they can get top on Google. There are websites dedicated to 'the art'. People become obsessive about it and many derive their entire livelihood from visitors they get from Google searches. The result? When Google makes a big change to how they rank websites in their index (which they did in November last year and to a lesser extent in January this year) many of these Google-dependent businesses actually WENT UNDER. That's right - bankrupted because of an over-night change made by powers that be at Google Towers.

So yes - search engines, and Google in particular, should be an important part of your online marketing mix. But nothing more than that - just one small part of bigger whole. Especially with recent rumblings from likes of Yahoo! and Microsoft, who are queuing up to topple Google's throne, you would be wise to set your sights on achieving a medium profile on hundreds of websites rather than a high profile on just one.

Mike Cheney www.magnet4web.com