Search Engine Ranking - Tips and Help

Search Engine Ranking

What search engines don't like
It is extremely important to know what search engines don't want. Otherwise, your perfectly optimized site can be blacklisted or not indexed. This is a high price to pay, considering that search engines account for 85% of new visitors to some sites.
Therefore, when you learn about factors that influence search engine rankings, you should also learn what to avoid.

How do search engines work?
Search engines help people find relevant information on the Internet.
Major search engines have huge databases of web sites that surfers can search by typing in some text.
Search engines send out spiders or robots, which follow links from web sites and index all pages they come across.
Each search engine has its own formula for indexing pages; some index the whole site, while others index only the main page. 
Search engines decide the amount of weight that will be placed on various factors that influence results.
Some want link popularity to be the most important criterion, while others prefer meta tags.
Search engines use a combination of factors to devise their formulas.

Directories - a whole different ball game 

Often confused with search engines, directories are completely different. Unlike search engines, directories use "human indexing;" people review and index links. Directories have rigid guidelines that sites must meet before being added to their index. Therefore, they have a smaller, but cleaner index.Yahoo!, LookSmart, MSN, Go and others are directories. Factors that influence search engine rankings are irrelevant to directory rankings. Since people review sites, more attention is placed on the quality of a site: its functionality, content and design. Directories strive to categorize sites accurately and often correct categories suggested by a site's webmaster.

Hybrid search engines: The new generation

Hybrid search engines combine a directory and a search engine to give their visitors the most relevant and complete results. The Top 10 search engines/directories today are hybrid. Yahoo!, for example, is a directory, which uses results from Google (a search engine) for its secondary results.

What search engines don't like

Search engines now know of this technique and define it as "Spam". Currently, sites that use invisible text are banned from most of the major search engines.

The following techniques are Spam:
Meta refresh tags 
Invisible text and overuse of tiny text 
Irrelevant keywords in the title and meta tags 
Excessive repetition of keywords 
Overuse of mirror sites (same sites that point to different URLs) 
Submitting too many pages in one day 
Identical or nearly identical pages 
Submitting to an inappropriate category (for directories)