Folks, volumes can be written about search positioning. And volumes *have* been written! I should know, I wrote a lengthy e-book about it myself called Search Engine Tactics. However, I've been asked here to sum up what everyone needs to know in a short article. It's a tall order, but I think we can do it. Let's get right down to business. I will simply provide you with a set of rules, which you can apply, for immediate results.

1. This discussion will focus on spider engines, that is, an engine that goes to your site and indexes what it finds. Directories are a whole 'nother ball game (which we will address in another article). Good examples of spiders are: Infoseek, Excite, and AltaVista.
2. Every search engine is different. You need to learn the "algorithm" (set of rules) used by each engine to rank pages. An algorithm is a set of rules.
3. These algorithms change constantly. This is why tips like "put 3% of your target keyword in your title tag" are probably worthless by the time you hear them.
4. The only reliable way to learn a sites algorithm is to analyze actual results of a search on that engine. This must be done using a reliable keyword density analyzer:
   
   < http://foreverweb.com/cgi-foreverweb/kda.cgi?IM4718 >
   
   This tool will show you the weight of particular keywords in high ranking documents. You then simply reproduce this weight in your document to attempt to reproduce the results. Any advice you find that did not come from an actual analysis is probably smoke and mirrors.
   This method is very reliable. There are a few other factors that will affect rank that can not be measured this way (link popularity, spam filtering etc.), but keyword density is the easiest to measure and most reliable factor.
5. You should not only be concerned with the rank of your listing, but with the way it appears in the engine as well. If your listing is #1, but looks like a bunch of junk (try a search right now and you'll see what I mean), it will be a waste of your time. The appearance of your listing depends on two of three things:
   
   (A) Your title tag e.g. <title>site title here</title>
   
   (B) Your description tag <meta name=description value="description here like this"> (applies to some engines - all others use the following)
   
   (C) The first 250 words (or so) of visible text on your site on your site
   
   (A) is what the engine links to your page. (B) or (C) are used as descriptive text for your link. You must balance your work on these tags. That is, sometimes what gets you a high rank will not make for an enticing listing. Remember that your title is most important. Think of it as a headline for an ad.
6. No software in itself is going to get you a high position on a search engine. Period. There are a great number of software products out there claiming to get you a higher position on the web. For the most part, save your money. There are really only two programs you need (and you *may* not even need them):
   
   a) A KEYWORD DENSITY ANALYZER: You don't really need this if you have some other tool that will allow you to analyze the composition of any text. If what I just said flew over your head, a keyword density analyzer is for you. Here is the only one I use:
   
   < http://foreverweb.com/cgi-foreverweb/kda.cgi?IM4718 >
   
   b) A SITE SUBMITTER: You don't really need one of these, either, if you are strictly focusing on a high position in the spider engines. You can probably submit your pages one by one just as easily since the process of gaining a high rank is a surgical one. However, if you need to submit many pages at once (if you do it will save time), or you want to submit to other types of sites (most submitters submit to over 900 sites and spider engines account for about 12 of those), then it is a good idea to get some software that will automate this task for you.
   

I recomend Global PromoBot. It is genuinely one of the few programs I use over and over again. Any campaign we conduct begins with a GPB submission to get a broad general coverage in as many places as possible:

< http://foreverweb.com/cgi-foreverweb/spider_click.cgi?IM4718 >

Now, some people in the know are probably going to be up in arms about my over simplification of this process. There is, of course, much more to it than I have listed here, but this information will get you started on the right track.