With a little bit of effort and the right information on search engines, PageRank, search engine marketing and search engine optimistaion (SEO) you can make a high ranking, successful, money making website. Good serach engine placement is the key to website traffic.

When I first became involved in creating and designing a website, I started off very basically. I had no script or code writing experience. I got a free website on a free web hosting site and using their site builder played around making a website for my hobby. It was actually a quite successful website. But alas, within eighteen months the site closed and yes, I didn't back up any of it. Bugger!

I then bought a domain name and some web hosting to go with it. Again I used their web page site builder and before too long got frustrated with it, the lack of fexability in both web page design and ease of scripting. For one reason or another I left the site alone for over twelve months.

Shock -Horror! What's happened to my website? I went searching the usual search engines one day and found my website was extremely hard to find. It had always been in the first three search pages for it's keywords and category. The top pages that 80% of web searchers view. No wonder, a lot had changed in website creation and search engine optimisation but my website hadn't!

It was time to act, update my skills and get that website back on track. I needed to invoke all the SEO techniques and tools I could find. Within two months I got my my website back within the top ten search engine rankings for all the keywords and started again making money. Here is how to get top search engine ranking and make a successful and profitable, money making website.

1. Get a domain name that reflects what your site is all about. Think of the domain name like a directory. It's a top level name. For example if your site is going to be about different aspects of a "deciduous tree", don't get a domain name called "treediseases.com", get one like "deciduoustree.com". The different sub sections of your domain will be taken care of by appropriately naming subdomains and your web pages. 
2. Don't just get one domain name get a couple of relevant dot coms. Consider using some of them to direct traffic and search engines to subdomains or specific pages. Top level dot coms seem to get their index page indexed faster than a new subdomain or internal webpage! Use them to your advantage in search engines and traffic generation.
3. Get a reliable web host. Web surfers will be turned away if your server goes down regularly, gives error pages or is slow to load.
4. Get web hosting with a good statistics package.
5. Get yourself a good web page editor. Easy and popular editors that help you script and code in ie. HTML and PHP.
6. Get yourself a good FTP (file transfer protocol) manager and learn how to use it and how your website server is organised and works.
7. Find some web page templates that you like. There is an abundance of free templates available.
8. Choose web page design that has navigation menus that don't get pushed too far up the html document and above your keyword rich text.
9. Get a good photo editor to manipulate photographs, make banners, buttons etc.
10. Play around with your webpages and FTP. Practice. Think about how you want the web page to look and work. Go find examples of code and script to suit your needs.
11. Start getting down to business and start making your index page. Think about how to introduce your website, the potentials of how it will expand. If you want to include rss feeds, make it a php index file.
12. Do a keyword search and list them. These will need to be in your headings, content, meta tags and search engine descriptions.  Aim for keyword density of about 2%. Much more and it will considered spam.
13. Use both popular and less common keywords and synonmyms in your body text to increase the chance of getting listed.
14. Include a Title tag as the first Meta tag, directly after the Head tag. Use keywords.
15. Include a Meta Description tag, directly after the Title tag. Use keywords.
16. Minimise words like an, a, and, the, he, her, etc in your titles and headings.
17. Try to avoid using Meta Refresh tag as some search engines regard this as spam. If absoltely necessary then set after 30 seconds.
18. Avoid using Author and Date etc Meta tags.
19. Is your site going to have pictures and photographs? Make sure you "alt=" in the script so when one places a mouse over a picture a text box appears. Search engines love this and it provides an extra for those who's browsers won't display pics. Make sure to use your keywords.
20. Go take a look at other websites that are going to be your competition. Critically evaluate. Learn from them. Check their keywords etc.
21. Content, content, content. Seach engines and web surfers need content. Make it happen. Maximum word count of 750 words. Optimal word count of 300 words.
22. Use longer or plural version of a keyword if possible. Word stemming is a concept used by some search engines to return search results that include keywords that extend beyond what you searched for.
23. Use different spellings for different countries. For example search engine optimization or optimisation. You will note I've even used the term SEO on this page as well.
24. Many search engines utilise the first couple of sentences of the body text as search results description instead of Meta Description tag. Check these body texts are appropriate and change as necessary.
25. Minimise the use of font size one (1). Search engines do view small text as spam. The same goes for font colour. Do not place text the same colour as the background on your web pages.
26. Change your content regularly. Get ezines, make your own, use rss feeds in your web pages. Create a news section or this weeks specials.
27. Update your web pages regularly. At least once a week. It does not need to be major but you don't want your returning visitors disappointed, never to come back. If your not dedicated, surfers won't be and neither will search engines.
28. Backup your website. All your effort will be wasted if you don't. It's quicker and easier to re publish by uploading than re inventing the wheel.
29. Validate your web page script.
30. Make a sitemap for your website. Both html - for the humans and xml for the search engine robots.
31. Make a robots.txt file.
32. Submit your website URL to as many search engines and directories as you can.
33. Submit your sitemap xml to Google and Yahoo.
34. Create cron jobs to automate sitemap xml generation at least once a week. Use cron jobs for as much website maintenance as you can.
35. Make sure your web pages link together logically and provide the web surfer ease of moving around your site. This will maximise the PageRank of all your pages within each web site
36. Use appropriate text in preference to pictorial hyperlinks.
37. Check your page load speed. Reduce the size of pictures etc if needed.
38. Use external scripts ie. JavaScript files instead of taking up space and loading time on your web page. Some search engines only aliquot a small volume to crawl. Don't give them unnecessary code that doesn't contain your keywords.
39. Make sure your page headings are page heading 1(<h1>), then heading 2 (<h2>), then heading 3 (<h3>)etc.
40. Create a blog or forum.
41. Make a rss feed for your ever changing web pages, blog or forum so users can keep up to speed with what is happening through readers or aggregators.
42. Submit your rss feed to Google and Yahoo.
43. Be patient. Search engine bots take their time visiting and re visiting. Don't be too hasty to change your web pages with the sole aim of improving their rank. Check your servers control panel stats and keep an eye on when the bots have visited. You might again change certain web page aspects thinking your changes have not worked when in fact the search engine bots have not got to it yet.
44. Exchange links with sites in the same category as yours in major web directories. Don't use link farms or link exchange programs. Use reciprocal linking. Don't link externally to irrelevant websites.
45. Join a webring.
46. Create your own webring and invite others to join.
47. Regularly check and mend any broken or outdated links.
48. Name your sub domains and web pages with sound terms. Avoid using ie. bpage1.html. Use deciduous_tree_diseases.html.

Help on many of the SEO tools and techniques discussed above can be found on this website through the links below. Try them and see your PageRank climb.