Introduction
Every site should attempt to do SEO even though most will fail. Although you may not be successful at reaching top search rankings for popular search phrases you may get lucky, without knowing what you are doing, to rank highly for less searched and less competitive search phrases.

What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is tweaking your web pages so that they come up on the first page of results for popular search phrases in all major search engines. There several ways to approach the problem but the end result should be that your pages improve in ranking over time for phrases related to your site focus.

It is difficult to get top search rankings
Do a search for any popular phrase and you will see millions if not hundreds of millions of sites that match your search phrase. And out of all those millions how many will you check through to find what you are looking for? To get any reasonable amount of traffic you need to be on the first page of search results and ideally in the top three results. But remember there are millions of other sites competing for that same coveted spot.

Can everyone achieve top search rankings?
Yes and No. Yes for less popular three or four word phrases and No the most popular single word or two word phrases. The shorter and more popular the phrase, the harder it is to rank highly in the search results for that phrase. You will often seen millions or even hundreds of millions of sites that match these popular phrase.

What search engines don't tell you
What they don't tell you is how to get to the top of their search rankings. And exactly what they are looking for will vary from search engine to search engine. In fact not only do they keep the specifics of what they are looking for a secrete they tweak their criteria from time to time and sites that had top rankings drop off and could be many pages back in the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages) and competitors who were back in the SERPS are now on the front page. Search Engine Optimization is not something you do one time and forget about. It is an ongoing process.

Example of top Search Engine Ranking
Our site XboxCheats.com has top rankings at every major search engine for the phrase xbox cheats. In fact, it is number one at Google out of almost 67,000,000 other sites. It has top rankings for thousands of search phrases related to the xbox game system. There are several reasons for this top ranking including the fact that Microsoft promotes XboxCheats.com as their partner on Xbox.com.

Know the right keyword phrases
Knowing the top search phrases related to your product or service is the most important starting place. By knowing the top phrases we don't mean guess. There are ways to find the top phrases and we offer this service to our customers. We can generate a list of thousands of search phrases that people enter into search engines and tell you how many searches are performed for each phrase every month.

How do you achieve top search positions?
It is a systematic process of making sure search phrases are on your web site pages in the right keyword density and are related to your site focus. We suggest that you do not try keyword spamming: I.E. not trying to load up your pages with unrelated phrases to gain more traffic. Search engines have evolved to understand not only what a single page is about but what the overall focus of the entire web site is about. They no longer look at your page as just a bunch of words.

Are inbound links important?
Yes. It is important to have links to your site from related sites and directories. Just as search engines can figure out what your page or site is about they can tell if a site linking to you is related or not. If it is related the search engines give more value to that link (as a vote for your site). The more of these quality votes for your site, the higher you will rank for related phrases.