Only a few people look further than the first or second result page of search engine results. Studies have found that around 75% of searchers never look further than the first page of results and that 90% don't look past the third page

So if you do not appear in the first page two or two of results, you are losing out, no matter how good your website looks, therefore you need to optimize your web pages for the search engines.

You can either do this yourself if you know how with SEO software to ensure that you are targeting the right keywords, and to easily check the rank of your web pages ... or you can get an SEO company to do this for you.

4 key things you need to get right for top search engine rankings

There are 4 things you need to get right if you want your site to rank well on the search engines.

1. Research which keywords people are searching for
2. Optimize your web pages for those keywords
3. Naming of your web page urls
4. Build links to those pages
5. Submit your site to the search engines

How easy it is to get top rankings then depends on how much competition you have - so for example if you want people to find your site when searching for "borneo rainforest birds" it should be quite easy to do... however if you want to be found for the search word "borneo" then you have a lot more work to do. There is no point in having good Meta tags if you don't have relevant incoming links.

As more and more sites have been established, so it is now much more difficult to achieve top search engine rankings.

Pay-per-click search can be used but since you might be competing for the same keyword with large corporations with big budgets, this can end up costing a lot. If you want high search rankings in the natural results - which still account for 70% of the page results - then you will need to ensure the content of your site is relevant to your visitors.

A search engine is judged by how relevant its search results are, so search engine companies have continually tried to improve their technology to return the most relevant results. One major advance they made was to include "link popularity" as a factor to rank web pages. Also it is not a good idea to trick search engines by using black-hat techniques such as cloaking because if you are caught your site could get banned from their index.

Link popularity tries to estimate how popular a website is compared to other websites about the same topic. Search engines therefore look at how sites link to your web pages and also how good they are. They can determine this by the website theme of the sites linking to yours and also by how popular your site is on social networking and online community sites.

Link popularity

When a search engine ranks your web page, it places a relevance on a number of different web page attributes, such as meta-tags, keyword density, and link popularity. The more weight your web page has compared to other pages found in a search, the higher it will rank. The objective is to return the most relevant results.

Pages that have many incoming links are likely to be more relevant than sites with fewer incoming links - these pages have a higher link popularity. However the topic relevancy of those incoming links is very important. Read more about link popularity here

The url of the page

The other thing you need to bear in mind is the url of the page is important. Do a search on Google or Yahoo and have a look at the urls of the results. You will see they are likely to contain the keyword you are searching for. This means you should include the best keyword for the page as part of the page url. For example if your page is about polar bears, the page could be called polar_bears.htm or contained in a folder for example called /polar_bears/

The second thing to bear in mind is your domain name. If you are in the UK for example, then if your domain contains ".co.uk", the top level doomain for UK, you are likely to rank higher than if you simply have a .com site. Therefore if your business is local to your country, it is advisable to register a local domain.

Submit your site

The major search engines these days are Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com. If you have a local domain, e.g. www.yoursite.fr, www.yoursite.co.in, etc... make sure you also submit it to the best known search engines in your country.

Before submitting your site you should check if you are already listed. Just search for www.yourname.com on the search engine and see if any of your pages appear in the search results. If not there should be a submission page on the search engine where you can submit your website URL. You should create a sitemap page listing all the main pages of your website and submit this URL for best results. If you have a Google account you can sign in and use the Webmaster Tools to specify the sitemap url.