With millions of web sites out there, and thousands being added daily, how is it possible to get and maintain top rankings in search engines?

Today, search engine submission has become somewhat of a science. In highly competitive fields, it literally can become a full time job to not only learn how to optimize your pages, but also to maintain highest rankings. For others, it at least requires optimization for specific keywords and engines.

First of all, study up on each engine's proprietary internal algorithms. Sites such as http://searchenginewatch.com are great for this.

Familiarize yourself with the marketplace. Perform searches you think your customers would use to find you, and see who comes up. Then, analyze their pages by viewing their source code. How many keywords are placed in META tags, and how many are in the title, and body? Note that some sites may come up and baffle you as to why they got high listings. There are several reasons this can happen, usually the page they submitted to the engines has been swapped for another, and the engine hasn't had a chance to re-index yet.

Did you know that most engines can penalize you for having too many keywords, or keywords in the wrong places? Search engines will try to index sites they think are most relevant, with actual, useful content, not pages stuffed with keywords in vain attempts to trick them. Also, some engines totally ignore META tags, yet some utilize them more fully. Each have their own "secret" algorithms, which

Years ago, such techniques would "fool" the engines into indexing your site higher, while today such attempts will actually lower your ranking, or worse yet, ban you altogether from being indexed at all.

So, it's more important than ever to keep abreast of the ever-changing search engine rules and to produce high-quality pages with real content and submit to the search engines often.

Here are some tips that experts agree will rank you higher:

- create "doorway" pages, optimized for each keyword, and each engine. However, keep it legitimate by designing these to be attractive, and full of valuable content.

- Design a catchy page title using your main keywords

- Your title should include a benefit, a reason your visitor should click on your site. Remember, your site may pop up with 9 others, so your title should not only have keywords, but be compelling

- Never use a free submission service. These take a single template and use a shotgun approach to auto-submit to thousands of engines. Only the top 14 or so matter. The rest are usually ways to get your e-mail address so that unscrupulous marketers can spam you later. Also, since each engine differs, you'll never get satisfactory results with this method. Ideally, each page should be optimized for each keyword, and each engine.

- For best results, use a totally manual submission service. These are the most expensive (costing up to $2000), but their results are the best you'll find anywhere. If you are selling a product or service on your site, then driving hundreds or thousands of targeted visitors searching specifically for you can literally translate into tens of thousands of dollars per year in revenue, or much higher.

Summary: Weigh your options. If you have a simple corporate identity site, or online brochure, then driving lots of traffic to your site won't translate into revenue. However, if you are selling a product or service, then you'll benefit greatly from having the experts optimize your site, create doorway pages optimized for each keyword, and each search engine.