We get a lot of questions about the search engines.  People want to know how they get to the top.  This article will describe a few tips to help your website move closer to the top of the list.

The important thing to remember is that the goal of the search engines is to connect the people who are looking for information with the people to are producing the information.  If you produce valuable, relevant information to the Internet community, you will get more traffic.  That is the general idea.  There are a few specific things you can do also.

Keywords

The first step is the easiest.  You want to make sure that your website contains all the keywords and buzzwords for your industry.  So simply get on your website and write those words somewhere on your site (preferably on your home page).  With Mnet, this is really easy because you simply login to your site, then click the Edit button and start typing.  

You should not do things like list a bunch of words that are all very similar: "widget, widgets, widgeting."  Google does not like this sort of thing.  Just write normally, simply and clearly.  Write for your target audience.

Generate In-links

This step requires more work.  In-links are the links that are on other websites, and when they are clicked, they go to YOUR website (they point "in", hence "in-link").  The place to start with in-links is to contact your customers, suppliers or any organizations that you belong to - then ask them to put a link to your website on their website.

A really great technique that can be repeated as much as you want is forum posting.  Go out on the Internet and find a website that is a forum or a news site (aka blog) where they are discussing issues related to your industry.  Join the community and take part in the discussion threads.  Answer people's questions and make insightful comments.

For each of your posts, simply put a link to your website in the footer (like a signature).  Over time this will have a massive impact on your search engine rank - this is because the information is very relevant - Google likes it when a site linking to another site has relevant information.

Remember that Google wants to connect the people who have the information with the people who are looking for it - so if you're an information producer and you point at the source of your information, you will find great success on the search engines.