It is important to know that search engines will actually use at least 200 factors to rank your website and determine which ones should on the first page. However these ranking factors can be split into 3 categories that you should focus on in order to optimise your website.

1. Search Engine Friendly Website

This is absolutely vital and you should make sure you get a web development company that understand this when they are putting your website together. There are various aspects to this but the main one is ensuring that the search engines can read your website as well as navigate it. This includes having text links on your menu and not creating a site that is completely flash.

The key to this is to remember that search engines cannot see they can only read. So unless you have relevant tags on your images they are worthless. The same for your links, if they are not text links then search engines cannot follow them and so will not be able to view all the pages on your website.

The other thing you should consider in the build process is your urls. These should be constructed so that they are descriptive and to not contain useless symbols and numbers that will mean nothing to the search engines.

2. Quality and Relevant Content

Now you have had your website created to be search engine friendly you need to start putting on your content. The most important thing to consider here is you should ensure you include your keywords for each page in the title tag, headers, main content and links.

Having said that it is really important not to cram your keywords in so that your website does not read well. The search engines will also check the readability of your website and if the score is poor you will suffer. Also remember that if your keywords appear too often you could end up being penalised for using spam techniques and have to start all over again.

3. Create Trust

Now you are ready to really begin moving up the rankings. In order to do this you need to get the search engines to trust you. There are various things they will use to determine trust including how old your domain name is and how long your website has been in place. However the most important aspect of this is your link popularity.

It is important to remember with link building that it is quality and not just quantity that matters. You might find that 100 high quality links are worth more to the search engines than 1000 links from low quality sites. After all the more trusted sites that will link to you the more you can be trusted.

The above information just gives you an overview of what is required to get top search engine rankings and each part needs to be delved into in detail. However if you split your efforts into these three categories it will allow you to focus your efforts where they are needed.