As you well know, getting a good listing on the search engines can really help get some good, quality traffic to your site.

But how do you get a good listing? That's the million dollar question.

Rather than explain how search engines select the top sites or how to trick them into listing your site in the top 10, let's learn some of the facts about search engines.

Now in case you're wondering why I don't just give you the 'magic' formula or algorithm for getting a good search engine placement I'll give you:

Fact Number 1: Search engines change their formula frequently in an attempt to keep quality sites at the top of the listing. They do this because of all the attempts to 'trick' or 'fool' them and, to stay popular with their users, they need to list the most relevant sites first.

Fact Number 2: Every search engine has it's own formula for determining the sites and the ordering of the sites it will list. And even though they all use many of the same factors in their formulas, there is no 1 formula that will work for all of them.

As for giving you some of the tricks that others have tried to use to get good search engine placement, I'll just say that the tricks that have worked in the past like using misleading meta tag keywords and embedding hidden keywords don't work today and the new tricks like creating lots of 'spam' sites using automatic search engine page creators won't be working much longer.

Fact Number 3: Search engine owners know the tricks being used and develop ways to filter them out.

Now that you know that there is no 1 'magic' formula and using a 'trick' won't work for long, you should also know:

Fact Number 4: Search engines do 'black list' sites they consider 'spam' and block them from being listed.

Because of all the articles and products about Google, you may think that Google has become the search engine of choice. And while Google is gaining in popularity,

Fact Number 5: Google still hasn't captured Yahoo's number 1position.

Even though Google isn't number 1,

Fact Number 6: Using 'good advice' on how to improve your Google position will also help you with your placement on Yahoo and many other search engines.

Some of 'good advice' for getting a good position is to have a site with good content and to use your keywords within your content. But the web has become so big that there are now thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of pages competing for the same keywords.

Because of this explosion in the number of pages available for generic keyword searches,

Fact Number 7: Search engine users are now adding more descriptive terms in their searches.

Another fact that most people don't realize about search engines is that:

Fact Number 8: Search engines don't rank or list web sites, they rank and list web pages. That means every page of your site has the potential to be listed if you set it up properly.

Since we're getting into the realm of less known search engine facts, let's talk about how

Fact Number 9: Search engines use their own traffic tracking information to help determine which sites to list. If they see that they have a top site that continually gets visited for a brief amount of time and the searchers usually come back and continue looking, the search engine may determine the site is of little value and either move it down on the list or remove it.

The last fact isn't really about search engines but has been included to help you measure your progress as you work to improve your search engine positions.

A couple of terms you've probably seen many times are 'Google Page Rank (PR)' and 'Alexa Traffic Ranking'. While both measure different things,

Fact Number 10: Google PR and Alexa Traffic Ranking are 2 of the best indicators on how well your search engine optimization work is going. Improving your Google PR and your Alexa Traffic Ranking can help you get a better search engine position.

This article was posted on December 12, 2005

About The Author

Susan Carroll owner of http://www.friendswhocare.us has formed a global community of online business people through her weekly newsletter.

Susan recently finished a free report about adding automatic content to your website that search engines can see. It's available at: http://www.friendswhocare.us/content.htm

You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as the bylines are included. A courtesy copy of your publication would be appreciated.