Search engine optimization is the process of achieving top rankings in the search engines for a website’s most relevant search terms. The most relevant search terms are the phrases that people are most likely to type into a search engine when looking for what the website has to offer. These are the search terms that it is essential to rank highly for, and these are the search terms that search engine optimization targets.

Search engines that are populated by spiders or by submissions result in large databases that Web surfers query to find Web sites. When you visit Lycos, Yahoo!, AltaVista or another search engine and type in a keyword, you’re actually performing a database query.

To determine which document or Web site to return for a particular keyword search, each search engine must have its own method of ranking documents, the Web sites, within its directory. Most use a “probable relevance” scoring method.

How Search Engines Rank Web Pages: From time to time, search engines change their scoring systems and stop rewarding certain techniques that gave you an advantage just days before.

Important Note:

This report contains the best tips and techniques at time of publication. Some techniques will stop working if a search engine changes its relevancy scoring system, which is bound to happen. Updates will be made to this report as we become aware of changes.

Here are a few of the important ones:

Your title tag should hold keywords that meaningfully describe your page. Note that this “title” refers to the one in the <head> section of your document, not the one displayed in your browser window.
The description meta tag, that is, a tag like <meta name=”description” content=”..etc..”>, is used as the description of your site in AltaVista’s listings, and may “also influence the ranking of your page for specific search terms”. This means, presumably, that if someone searches for a particular keyword, and it appears in your description and title tags, AltaVista will accord that page a higher rank than if it did not occur there.
The proximity of one keyword to another, and their keyword density is important to AltaVista. This probably means that if someone searches for “search engine optimization” and your page has many instances of those three words in sequence, your page is considered more relevant than another page with those three individual words scattered all over the page.
Although not mentioned in the current version of their FAQ, it is usually held among webmasters that links to your site containing the keyword that the visitor is searching for improve your site’s ranking on AltaVista. For example, if a visitor is searching for “CGI scripts” and there are many links to your site with those words in the anchor text, your site will be ranked higher.