Search engines are frugal things. (Froogle, too, haha! Sorry, lame joke) They take many, many things into consideration when ranking your pages. Below are some things you should do to be sure you're ranked as high as possible.
Keywords
Go for keyphrases, not single keywords. Unless you want to spend the next 3 months trying to break into the first page for a single keyword, focus on keyphrases. Besides, most searchers search for two or more words. Single keywords just don't provide the targeted results searchers are looking for.
Focus on the keyphrases that you can take over. Keyphrases like "Exit now" or "Exit Here" or even a keyword like "Exit" will be next to impossible for you to get a top 3 ranking, because of the overwhelming popularity for porn site landing pages to put a link to Yahoo, Google, or Disney with the anchor text of one of those keyphrases mentioned above. Go ahead, try it out ? type one of them into Google and see what you get. Funny enough, Disney recently took the lead over Yahoo for the keyword "Exit." Go Disney go!
Site Focus
Don't allow your site to focus on more than 1-2 different things. Create separate sites for each product or service, and if you'd like, a main site to describe your company, and have it link to all of your products. This will allow you to better target your pages, because a user looking for widgets isn't going to stick around long on a page for a company that sells widgets and woozles, when they don't see information about widgets (even if it's blatantly obvious) Think about it this way: You're always one click away from losing a customer on the internet. Do everything you can to eliminate that one click.
Content: More is better
The more content you have, the better. Wait, let me rephrase that ? the more RELEVANT content you have, the better. Plain old content, or keyword-stuffed will only get you so far. Remember, you've got to keep your visitors in mind primarily, because it doesn't matter how high your SE ranking is if your visitors don't convert to customers.
How do I get new, relevant, free content?
Start posting articles on your site; you're the expert here, so utilize that information. But keep your articles from sounding like you're only writing it to advertise your product (advertorials). If it sounds too much like an ad, your visitors won't read it.
Also, try to mention your chosen keyphrases as much as you can without making the article sound "stuffed." What's "stuffed" mean? Here's an example: You're writing about widgets, you wrote the widgets article about widgets so you could say widgets as much as you possible while talking about widgets. Would you want to sit and read that? No. Neither would anyone else.
There are also quite a few places on the net where you can find articles that are free to reprint on your site. A few of them are http://www.EzineArticles.com, http://www.Content-Articles.com, and http://www.ArticlesFactory.com. As I said, there are many sites like these, but these are the 3 best, in my opinion. Some article directories are focused on a single set of topics (like Business Marketing) and others, including the three mentioned above, contain articles from many, many categories.
If you write your own articles, submitting them to as many article sites as possible, again including the three I listed before. The more places you submit your article, the more sites will pick it up ? either through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or by cutting and pasting your article to their site. The latter option is preferable to you, because your article will stay on their site longer. This will work hard to generate you more traffic from visitors to those sites who read your article and increase your SE rankings through backlinks. (For more information, check out an article I wrote about backlinks at http://www.Content-Articles.com/article.aspx?i=24)
How often should I add new content?
Add new content at least weekly, and absolutely no less than monthly to give your customers reason to come back, and Search Engines will also increase your ranking because your site is active and you've got good content.
What about forums?
Forums can be great tools for site promotion, if you do it right. Do NOT post ads to a forum that isn't for posting ads. You will do more to destroy your credibility than generate traffic. Put a link to your site in your signature, and post questions and answers to the site, just like everyone else. If a topic that your site contains information about comes up, feel free to post the URL in the body of the topic (make sure this is allowed by the forum rules first) but always mention that it's your site, so nobody is mislead and thinks the post is a referral, which it's not (because it's your site).
These tips are just a few of the things that you can do to increase your search engine rankings. Take your time and develop a good site, write quality articles, submit them to as many places as possible, and watch your ranking go up while the visitors come rolling in.
Jason a long time web developer and the owner of Premier MicroSolutions, LLC. If you're looking for more articles about getting higher SE rankings, go to Content-Articles.com and check out their great directory of articles.