This is a guide to help people get more traffic from the search engines to their website.

With the new programming changes at the search engines a lot of people are confused, so I will try and explain what you can do to get higher ranings and of course more traffic to your website.

Before you optimize your site do a search using the key phrase that you want to use for your site. See what the other sites look like and use your web browser to view their source code. You will want to determine some information about the other sites that are showing up at the top of the rankings for the same key phrase you use.

There are various tools you can use to gather this information and if you can't find them on the internet you can contact me through ebay and I will be more then happy to try and point you in the right direction.

You will want to see what the top 5 or 10 sites are doing and try to emulate that with your website to get a front page listing on your page.

The information you will want to find is:

1. The number of pages they have indexed in the search engine. You will want to make a list in the same order as the search engine ranks them and put that number beside each site that is a top listing. You can usually throw out the high and low number and then average the rest and that will be a good starting point for how many pages your website should have. Too few pages and the search engine doesnt think you have enough content to be revelant and too many pages and they think you are just creating content to get higher rankings.

2. The number of back links they have. These are the sites that link back to them. Again make a list and see what the average is and try and aquire the average amount of links for your site. Some people believe that more links are better but for now lets just try and get you into the same average pool at the other sites. What you want is links where you do not have to trade. So this means you will probably need to buy links to your site or have such a unique website people will want to link to you because its so different.

3. See what their word density is. This is basically the ratio of the amount of times the keywords you want are used on the page compared to the total amout of words on the page. Try to always stay within 1% of the average.

4. The word frequency. This is how prominant your key words are on the page. As an example if you have your key word phrase as the first several words on your website and nowhere else on the page you would have a prominance of 100 percent. If it was in the middle of the page it would be 50 percent and if it was at the very end it would be 0 percent. Of course to make your word density work you will have several repeats on your page so you will have to take into consideration how many repeats you have and also where they are on the page. Don't worry, there are programs that will do this for you that you can download.

5. Make sure you update your content frequently. You can do this by adding an RSS feed to your site pulling content from one or more revelant sources. Writing new articles about your topic and posting them to your site. Be creative. But make sure that your pages are not stagnant. Change them at the least weekly.

Once you do these 5 things to your website, you are ahead of about 99 percent of the sites on the internet. So now you just need to register your website with the search engines. The first time you register your site, try and do it manually and then move to automated submission tools later.

Here is another good tip to get more traffic and also to get your site indexed into the search engines faster.

Start a blog about your website and let users post comments there. This is considered news so the search engines index it usually within 8 to 10 hours. Every time you post to it make sure you ping the site out so that the engines know its updated. Also make sure the titles of all your postings are links back to your website.

Most blogs automatically create an RSS feed. Let people use this on their sites because that will get you more links. Make sure you put it on your main page with the offer to let them use it.