Getting a higher rank in a search engine

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Hi sorry if this is the wrong forum but I was wondering if anyone could tell what are the best methods of ensuring your website gets a high rank in a search engine? I started building a website with a friend 7 months ago it is doing ok but I feel would be busier if it had a higher rank in google and other search engines. Any help and advice given on this would be much appreiciated.

 

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I believe that most popular search engines like Google have changed the way in which they rank pages and no longer have such a reliance on the page description and other meta tag contents.

Check this link to see what they say...

http://www.google.com.au/corporate/tech.html

 

I've been looking at a sub project along these lines recently and it is a MAJOR headache.
If I had to sum it up in a single line, make your site interesting and relevant. Informational sites always do well because they are specific in what they offer 'Error code 0x00ED000... whatever' and people use them and link to them.
Sales or marketing is more difficult. You want to sell your mops on the net? How do you make people come to you?

It's actually very competative and it is a constant battle to stay at the top.

The irony is, if you google the term 'search engine ranking' and see how many links are returned - why would you want to read past the first one, all the others clearly got it wrong.

 

That quote hits the nail on the head. I'm building a site at the moment and the subject of SEO is too big to be ignored. From what I'm learning about how to do it and how not to do it high quality content will ultimately always win the day over 'search engine optimisation'.

Reason being that the search engines are in the business of returning the highest quality results in their search results. They measure the quality of sites based on various hideously complicated algorythms that are constantly evolving to improve the quality of their SERPs (search engine result pages) for human visitors.

Don't fall into the trap of SEO by number crunching and trying to play catch up with the search engine algorythms it's a losing battle and a waste of time that would be much better spent creating quality content. Of course keyword research is very important so you need to blend that with quality content.

If your content is good people will stay on your site for longer when they click from a SE, the SE logs this as a positive result and ups your rank a bit based on that. Inbound links and directory listings will help you a lot as well. Whatever you do though do NOT get bogged down in SEO 'chase the algorythm' it's really not worth the time. Here's a good article about growing your traffic 'organically':

http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Website-Promotion-Help/Build-Your-Sites-Popularity-Organically/