If you want your online business to be successful, it's a good idea to optimize your site on a regular basis to make sure it's got a good position in the Web's top search engines.

However, in order to maintain your ranking, you have to keep on top of what's happening in the rapidly changing search engine industry. The rules that affected your ranking yesterday may be meaningless tomorrow!

Read on to learn more about the latest developments in the search engine industry and what key tricks you should (and shouldn't!) use to optimize your site to make sure it gets a high ranking with all the major search engines, plus the tools and resources you can use to keep it there.

The "Dos" and "Don'ts" are constantly changing! The search engine industry is continually evolving. You need to know which of the major "players" is powering the smaller search engines if you want to know where you should focus your optimization efforts.

1. The battle of the titans

For the past couple of years, the major search engines have been preparing to square off against each other and battle it out for the industry's top spot. Google has been #1 for a while now, but Yahoo! and MSN have been making moves to steal the crown.

Google is still extremely powerful, with about a 55% market share. Yahoo! is the closest runner-up, with about 20% of users choosing it as their main search engine. And MSN is still a distant but threatening third, with about 10% of the global usage share.

Keep in mind, however, that Google and Yahoo! power many of the smaller search engines. For example, Google powers the free listings featured on AOL and Netscape, plus the paid listings featured on AOL, Netscape, Ask Jeeves, HotBot, Teoma, and Lycos.

Yahoo! powers free listings featured on MSN, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, and HotBot, plus the paid listings on MSN, AltaVista, and AllTheWeb.

However, MSN won't be powered by Yahoo! for much longer! MSN came out with a preview of their own long-anticipated search engine technology earlier this month. They're still working out the bugs, and the official MSN Search engine is still being powered by Yahoo!. But you can expect MSN to go solo sometime over the next few months.

You need to be aware of these changes if you want to gear your optimization efforts toward the engines that will send you as much traffic as possible.

2. The changing rules of search

Of course, you also need to keep tabs on changes to the search engines themselves!

Search engines frequently change the algorithms they use to rank sites. They don't want unscrupulous site owners manipulating their indexing methods in order to get high rankings. By doing so, they damage the integrity of free search!

As soon as the search engines become aware of a trick being used by "search engine spammers" to boost their site ranking, they figure out a way to catch them.

So be careful! You don't want to catch yourself employing a "great strategy" promoted by a marketing "expert," only to find out it's a tactic the search engines hate! That could get you booted off their listings in no time flat.

In fact, that's exactly what happened at the end of last year, during what has come to be called the "Florida Google Dance."

Google made some major changes to their algorithms in November 2003 and started imposing an "over-optimization penalty" on any sites that appeared to be artificially boosting their site's relevancy for targeted keywords.

Many members of the business community were surprised to find their sites dropped from their high ranking in Google's listings. These people had to put a lot of work into revamping and resubmitting their sites in order to get listed again.

And many of the people who were penalized weren't "unscrupulous" site owners! They weren't trying to pull a "fast one" on search engines using frowned-upon techniques such as "keyword stuffing." They were simply trying to be smart marketers -- and some feel they were unfairly punished for it.

You don't want the same thing to happen to you!

So let's have a look at a list of what exactly the search engines are currently looking for when indexing sites -- and what they'll punish you for...

If you want to skip the failing actions and get a personal tour of REAL PEOPLE making REAL PROFITS on the Internet, then go to...

http://advancedinternetwealth.50webs.com/index.html6.htm

... and take advantage of the invaluable tips and tricks that these Internet successes reveal so that you can start applying them to your business today.