Aha, sorry misunderstood before.

I've not done one myself, but a tip from someone who has is to put any common mis-spellings of anything your site may be about in the meta tags so that even if someone types it in incorrectly (whether on purpose or not), your site will still be one that's returned.

1) Key word search. In a keyword search, you enter one or more keywords into the engine and the search engine finds specific topics by locating those keywords or phrases in registered web pages. You can access a search index using a search engine, or you can manually navigate through an index’s structured directory using an information portal.After browsing directories to find general categories, you can use keyword searches to narrow your search results. Search engines vary greatly, some search only the web and others such as Google also search for articles in newsgroups. Some engines provide links to sites and others specify URL’s. Some engines may give brief descriptions of the site contents and others may include paragraph summaries of the site. Traditionally, the search engines from various sites focussed on indexing HTML pages. They now have the ability to search for, and index the contents of additional file types.


Alta Vista is one of the most complete and powerful databases. Together with Google, Alta Vista is a full text index search engine. All page content is searched for content description,relevancy and other information by robot or spider programs, contai
A very powerful search engine that contains one of the largest web databases. It offers two search engine/levels: general and advanced. To ensure the most current database contents, Alta Vista uses a web spider program to routinely search every web page. Pages that do not change are checked less frequently than those that do change often. Like many search engines Alta Vista returns your results in terms of accuracy, with the highest likely returns posted first. The results are influenced by a combination of the following events.

1) The keywords or search strings you specify are found in the title, or page text near the beginning of the document, or in the HTML’s <meta> tag.
2) The web document contains additional keywords or strings
3) The web document contains keywords or strings that have been assigned a high priority by the search engine.








Boolean operators

Just as standard mathematics uses addition, subtraction, division and multiplication, Boolean logic uses the AND, OR , NOT operators. Boolean operators enable users to narrow their search results by requiring or excluding keywords from the search criteria. When you use the OR operator between two keywords, results will contain one keyword or the other or both. The more terms you combine with an OR operator the more results you retrieve.

When you use the AND operator between keywords, results may contain both keywords. The more terms you combine using the AND operator, the fewer results you retrieve.

When you use the NOT operator with a keyword, you are specifying that the results
Cannot contain the keyword that follows the operator.

Most search engines allow the use of the plus sign (+) to signify the AND operator and the minus (-) sign to signify the NOT operator. You can also use brackets to combine Boolean phrases. This strategy identifies single concepts and indicates the order in which the relationship should be considered.


Boolean operators Action performed
AND, & Results must include both words
OR, | Results must include at least one of these words
+ ( plus sign does not always work in advanced search) Results must include the word specified after the operator
NOT, ! ( minus sign does not always work in advanced search) Results must exclude the word specified after the operator
NEAR, ADJ (adjacent),FAR, BEFORE Two keywords on a page must be within a certain proximity to each other (near or far)
“ keyword” Keywords must appear in phrases in the order specified
() ,< >,[], { } Boolean operator phrases must be performed in the order specified
*( Example: colour*will return colour, colours colorize, Colorado etc) The root wordcan include variations in spelling. This Boolean operator is called a wildcard character
*(Example: colour. Will return only colour, not colours, colourise, Colorado etc) The root word cannot be expanded

I have enquired and apparently to appear in the optimum position that you are asking about you have to pay the search engine operators who arrange it. This means you have to contact Google or Yahoo etc.

Slightly different to what your asking but I believe of significant help is the meta tag
<META NAME="ROBOTS">
which is an instruction to tell the search engine's bot to return so that it will keep coming back and relog your page's updates.

You didn't make a hash of it just people misunderstood - having regular updates/change of content to your pages apparently helps

This is a massive subject. Getting your Website to the top of a search engine’s ranking is a major industry all by itself. If you search for ”search engine rankings” in Google, you’ll see that vast numbers of people willing to help, mostly for a price. There are some useful utilities like this one http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports/ which will check your ranking with the major search engines without you having to try them all yourself.

It used to be fairly easy to get to the top of the rankings just by using a sensible mix of meta tags but nowadays search engines use much more sophisticated systems to rank Websites. This is to ensure that the top ranking sites are the most relevant. In the case of Google it also stops sites from engineering their way to the top so they don’t have to buy a ‘sponsored link’ to ensure their prominence. Google uses over 200 elements to determine ranking.

One of the main rules in a ranking algorithm involves the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. This is to stop people having a mass of keywords hoping to hit the right ones. The location and frequency ranking assumes that pages with the search criteria in the HTML title are more relevant that others.

Search engines will also check to see if the search keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. They assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the beginning. (I can’t find or remember the figures now but Ask (the system used by Lycos) checks more of the page than some other search engines).

One very important factor here is to avoid the use of frames if possible as the main page on the URL will usually be an almost empty frame.

The other factor in how search engines determine relevancy is the frequency that keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages.

The ranking algorithm will detect search engine "spamming", such as when a word is repeated hundreds of times on a page, to increase the frequency and propel the page higher in the listings. The word doesn’t have to be visible of course.

Another ranking tools used is link analysis. This determines how “important” the page is by analysing how pages link to each other. In addition, sophisticated techniques are used to screen out attempts by webmasters to build "artificial" links designed to boost their rankings.

Another factor measured is the click through rate. The search engine will monitor what results somebody selects after a specific search and drop Websites down the ranking if they are being ignored or promote lower-ranking pages that do attract interest.

I design Websites and host some of these for people. Getting your site to the top of the listings is much harder nowadays as the Search Engines want you to pay for a sponsored link, they would say that is the way to achieve what you want.

Many have provided quite comprehensive answers here,so. I'll just add this:

Search engines bots also catagorise word (keywords esp) by importance too. So for example highlighting, underlining, bold, and italic formatting helps to rank your pages!