At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, greater traffic that is directed to your website. That's what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is title bar on your homepage.

The title bar is colored bar at top of page. Look at words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, words on your homepage's title bar should include most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.

Then click on all your links and examine title bars on pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain most important keywords and phrases taken from page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.

The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain most important keywords - words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.

Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, search engines must be able to read text, meaning that text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

How do you do this? Look up top 20 web sites on major search engines under keywords and phrases people would find your web site. The key would be to then advertise on those web sites.

The most expensive way would be to buy ad space on those web sites. If you don't want to spend any money, you could use ten strategies below. These strategies may not apply to every web site.

1. Participate on their discussion boards. You could post questions, answer other peoples questions, and join in on conversations. Just include your signature file and link at end of your messages.

2. Ask web site owner if they would like a free ebook to giveaway to their visitors. You could have them link to your web site or include your ad in free ebook.

3. Submit content to their web site. You could write articles for their web site and include your resource box and link at end of article. If they publish it, you'll indirectly be at top of search engines.

4. Write an excellent article review of their web site, products or services. Then publish review on your web site. E-mail web site owner and tell him or her about it. They may link to your web site so their visitors read it.