Try a new search, make your query more regional "video rentals in London" or "holiday resorts in Florida". How many pages are turned out now? Modify your search terms any way you like until you have cut your competitors' pages to 1% or less of their original number, which is surprisingly easy to do. Make sure your terms are still relevant to your site, you want targeted visitors, not any random surfer who'll leave two page views after they enter. Once you have found a good search term add it to a meta keywords tag at top of a new page with content relevant to that keyword term. Place term in text of your page a number of times so that it appears naturally and often. Don't edit your keyword inadvertently by reducing it to a common abbreviation, for example, "airplanes" to "planes". Then submit your page to search engine, once it is listed see where it ranks and play with content to push it up ranking for your new keyword term, you have 100 times less opposition so your chances of getting a top ten ranking are enormously better.

Of course more specific phrases are searched for less than general terms so don't stop with one term do 10 or 20 and design a new page within your site with relevant content that contains each term repeatedly. Consider millions of searches performed each day and if your term isn't too obscure you should hope for it to turn up a few times every day on each search engine. Consider if you had 20 terms with top ten search engine rankings and each searched for three times a day in total across all search engines. That would give 22 000 extra highly targeted unique visitors a year and that is a very conservative estimate.

Who's Too Small To Matter? Northern Light, Wisenut, etc. - there are still a few minor search engines out there, and at least some have sound business fundamentals that will keep them from disappearing. In big picture, though, they simply don't command much traffic.

What Does It Mean? For starters, there will likely be only three significant search engine databases - a year ago there were at least seven. Interestingly, all three use "themes" to categorize and rank websites.

As a result, a solid search engine positioning strategy should focus on providing three things that three major indexes and DirectHit reward: consistent theme; significant content; and high-quality linking relationships.

A consistent theme means careful keyword selection and use - not trying to make every page stand alone, but instead weaving them together in a logical fashion.

Good content not only reinforces theme, it also provides a reason for visitors to stay on site longer, which improves DirectHit ratings.

Finally, quantity of incoming and outgoing links will matter less over time, while context and quality of those links will continue to become more important, ensuring that major directories will have plenty of customers for a long time.

I wish you success...