As you are building your site or getting your site built, you need to do as much as you can to ensure higher rankings in search engines. There are a variety of little tips and techniques you can use to do this.

Meta tags & keywords - Meta tags are included in section of your site and are read by search engines. The two most important kind are "description" and "keywords" Description is a description of content of your site and keywords is a list of keywords relevant to page.

Research what people are searching for and use those searches (relevant to your site) in your meta tags. A great little keyword search tool is available here: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Find more great info on meta tags here: http://www.metamend.com/search-engines-meta-tags.html

Site content- Make sure you match your site content with your meta tags. Also, keep updating your site content. Search engines love new content. Try adding articles to your site or doing a blog. Do NOT let your site get old and stale!

Blogging - A blog is basically a journal that is posted on a web site. A person who blogs is a blogger. Blogs are usually updated daily or every other day. Blogs can be used on personal or business websites. Blogs can draw a lot of targeted traffic to your site. You can create your own blog here: http://www.blogger.com/start

Dear Bill Gates.

You did it. You casually left a live grenade at Grand Charity Gala and walked out of room to see if anybody, especially Google, will notice.

Once again, you have created an innovation in marketing that is poised to take world by storm. What I love about it is how you have just tossed it out into public for all to see, and yet nobody seems to be noticing it.

Flitting from forum to forum, everyone is talking about your new MSN beta search engine ( http://beta.search.msn.com/ ), but nobody seems to have discovered secret marketing bomb you left ticking there.

Google sure was clever with its PageRank gimmick. In fairness, PageRank is not just a gimmick, but it was marketed as much more than it is -- big ka-boom that sets Google apart, despite being only a small part of its algorithm.

But your ka-boom will be bigger. You have actually given searchers like me control over my own rankings. While other search engines are talking about "personalized search", you've given us levers to incrementally change rankings in searches themselves.

You are probably aware that webmasters are kicking tires on your new search engine to see how high they rank. Those who are more adventuresome or who earn their living understanding (or trying to understand) search engines are taking some of your special features for a spin. Most of those features are fairly mundane. Like "links to" (although it might just be most comprehensive listing on Internet – hint to webmasters) and "language".

But what's this at very bottom, almost falling off my screen?

Results Ranking.