In a quest for high rankings among increasingly competitive markets, webmasters generally have an ongoing mission to achieve and maintain high rankings for popular search terms. Since smaller companies and websites have limited advertising budgets, search engine optimization is recognized the best way of gaining long term exposure and driving targeted traffic to a website.

A problem often arises when webmasters, particularly newer and less experienced ones, start researching ways of obtaining high rankings. Most websites that offer resources on optimizing pages for search engines still lean towards writing efficient Meta tags and selecting the best keywords. Although this helps, its a known fact that Meta tags have become less important over the years. In fact, Inktomi is the only search engine that still uses them for ranking websites. Yahoo!, Google, and all other main search engines have abandoned the Meta system. The keyword tags no longer impact rankings. The description tag is still important, but it wont have a tremendous impact on rankings like it once would have.

Webmasters often become very disappointed when they see that much of the work put forth to optimize a website was unnecessary. Its even more devastating to see that all the work put into optimizing pages will not gain you high rankings. Many start to wonder what they did wrong. One important factor is almost always initially overlooked- more credible websites will always have higher rankings, regardless of how optimized a smaller website may be. Keyword densities and title tags are still important in categorizing a website for the engines, but link popularity has become the main factor in ranking websites. Thats not to say that optimizing websites isnt important.

The point here is that optimizing a website means no more than exactly what it says- optimizing. It means that a website is fit to be considered relevant for the selected keywords when indexed for placement. It does not mean that a website will automatically achieve high rankings in those keywords. It can mean potentially pulling ahead of a competitor with more link popularity but less relevance. But dont be fooled- even if a website with 100 good back links in Google is optimized perfectly, it wont outweigh a less relevant competitor with 10,000 back links and a higher PageRank when competing for a popular keyword. Most webmasters are baffled when they dont get the rankings they have worked for. The solution is gaining link popularity; this can be achieved by trading links with relevant websites and submitting to popular directories. It will build up over time and a website will gain the credibility it deserves when it has many websites linking to it.

Finding a good source for continually submitting to the search engines and keeping track of rankings and link popularity is a very important factor in having long term success with search engine optimization. MDTrafficBuilder is a website that has proven to be very effective and cost-efficient in continually submitting to search engines and monitoring progress. The link to this website can be found in the author resource box. They have a free 5 day trial, so theres no risk at all. Its a good way of keeping track of competition and monitoring link popularity.

Regardless of which way you choose to gain higher rankings for your website, remember the real meaning of Search Engine Optimization, and think realistically of how your website compares with the competition. Achieving high rankings is a long term project, not a quick fix for low traffic websites. If you think realistically and work hard for higher link popularity, high search engine rankings will eventually find you.