As I travel through the Google search engine, there is one element that defines almost all of the top-ranking websites. It's great content. People come online for information and those that offer the best content reap the greatest rewards.

Unfortunately, this type of content is hard to come by. In most cases, you either have to spend hours in front of the keyboard or outsource the job to others. Both of these options are very costly. One requires your valuable time and the other requires an investment of around $10 - $20 per article..

Search engine optimisation or optimization (with a 'z' or is that 'zee' if your from across 'the pond') techniques are constantly evolving. This evolution is in response to the evolution of search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Google in particular has come to be seen as the most sophisticated and advanced search engine as it is armed with an array of anti-spam technology.

Google's increasing use of anti-spam features has meant that optimising websites for Google has become much harder and it's now not just a case of opening your websites source files in notepad, adding some keywords into your various HTML tags, uploading your files and waiting for the results. In fact in my opinion and I'm sure others will agree with me, this type of optimisation, commonly referred to as onpage optimisation will only ever be 20% effective at achieving rankings for any keywords which are even mildly competitive. Those of us who aced maths in school will know this leaves us with 80% unaccounted for..

Search engine optimization (SEO) is necessity for the success of almost every site. SEO is the use of keywords from the beginning of the site that is called page title to throughout the website content. In particular, the density, placement and the actual keywords phrases themselves..

SEO is a way of analyzing your site and modifying it to allow Search Engines to read and index it more easily. SEO is all about maintaining and building websites that get ranked highly on the major Search Engines. Whether your site is profitable or not with PPC advertising, Search Engine rankings are an important factor to consider in improving profitability. The higher you are on a variety of Search Engines, the better off your profitability. When used properly in combination with other basic Search Engine tactics, these tips can help to dramatically improve your placement with the Search Engines and increase the traffic to your web site.

We've known for a long time that quality matters to Google. In a post Senior Google Engineer Matt Cutts made to his blog, "quality" was mentioned several times as being important to Google. Quality matters when it comes to content, and it matters when it comes to links.

However, building content and links doesn't have to be painful. Web site owners tend to think of content in a very limited way. So, let's open up our creative minds and think of all sorts of ways of adding quality content to a Web site.

You know the old saying about not criticizing someone until you walk in their shoes. But have you noticed how critical many SEOs and Webmasters are when it comes to the search engines, when they've never walked "in their shoes"? Spam is a perfect example.

The search engines have publicly stated that over 90% of submissions made through free add URL pages are spam. A few years ago, a FAST search engine representative showed me some examples of spam - how they tracked spammers, the sheer amount of spam coming from just one spammer, and so forth. Can you imagine how much better their strategies are now for catching spammers?

For a number of years now, linking has been an important part of ranking well in the SERPs, especially for SE's like Google. At first it was generally acceptable to acquire links from nearly any site, regardless of whether a particular site's content was related to yours.

As Google began to place more importance on back links, it became necessary to ensure that other sites linking to yours had related content and a fairly good Google Page Rank. Webmasters everywhere began reciprocal linking campaigns. And as you might guess, they found the process to be very tedious and time-consuming..

There is little argument from webmasters and publishers that RSS brings in traffic. So once you've made the leap and created a feed, how do you tell your visitors about the feed?

1. Submit Your RSS Feed to RSS Directories.

This will not only increase the number of sites linking to your website and increasing your link popularity, it will also increase the RSS feeds profile. A number of RSS search engines and RSS directories exist that allow you to freely submit RSS feeds. Feeds are generally categorized and grouped together by subject..

A Google Sitemap is a very simple XML document that lists all the pages in your website, but the Google Sitemaps program is actually much more important than that. In fact, the Sitemaps program provides a little peek inside Google’s mind – and it can tell you a lot about what Google thinks of your website..

For the uninitiated, Google ranks all pages on the web with a scale of PR0 to PR10 - higher is better. High PR sites or pages receive most of the traffic for competitive keywords or phrases. Keywords are what surfers type into search engines to find what they're looking for on the web.