As I mentioned in part 1 here are the key steps to always follow when trying to improve your page ranking:

* Improve your Link Popularity * Carefully consider your Metatags and Keywords/Phrases * Write a persuasive Home Page * Use Clickthroughs and Affiliate Programs for better ranking * Submit a Site Map

If you want to improve your sites visibility in regards to the search engines then you need to improve your link popularity. You first need to determine your link popularity. There are 2 reasons for this. The first is that your link popularity will improve your ranking on all crawler based search engines. Remember, spiders crawl from one webpage to another through links. The second reason is that search engines give websites with good inbound and outbound links a higher ranking. This makes sense simply because they figure that if your are referring visitors to other material then you must be providing a valuable service. And other sites are referring to you then you must have something of value to offer.

Meta tags are not the complete answer but they may help you with some search engines, so you should give them a great deal of consideration. Your Meta Tags provide valuable information that is not seen by your viewers. The Meta information found in the "head" area of your web pages is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with.

The Title Tag is probably the most important and should be carefully handled. It is extremely important because it is often the first one indexed and is given a higher weighting in the relevance rankings. Remember to keep it short and make sure the tag has material that is relevant to the keywords used during the search.

Writing a strong homepage is a real challenge even for seasoned for webmasters. Understandably, if you have put a lot of thought and effort in writing your home you may be hesitant to rewrite it. But remember, making it the best for your visitors is one thing, but is it the best for for the search engines in terms of how your site will rank?

Remember that a powerfully optimized homepage will please both the search engines and your prospects. You 'll know that you've hit the mark when you start converting a high percentage of your visitors. To be powerful and effective your homepage should have at least 300 - 400 words for maximum effectiveness. One way to do that is to increase your word count with more value-added content. This often means having to rewrite your homepage.

Writing a powerful and effective homepage around carefully selected keywords and key phrases is probably the best way you can drive targeted traffic to your site (see http://www.targeted-traffic-site-builder.com for a great example). Some people will tell you that re-writing takes too much time and is too expensive...well, think of the cost of losing prospective clients, lost sales and opportunities.

Using affiliate programs for optimization has plenty of people for and against it. I feel that if you take the time to carefully set up your affiliate program then it certainly won't hurt you. Typically this type of program involves site that send you traffic and visitors and are paid on the number of clicks or some other parameter. Be sure to use tracking software to monitor clicks using a redirection measurement system.

One final tip...prepare a crawler page or pages to submit to the search engines. This page should have no text or content, only links to all the important pages that you want to have crawled. When the spider reaches this page it will crawl to all the links and pull in all the information on these pages into its index.

Following these tried and true steps will only lead to good results. There is nothing magical about them. It just plain hard work that anyone can do and it produces real results.

Luis A. Castillo is an accomplished webmaster and affiliate marketer who has been effectively marketing online for over 3 years. For more information on setting up a successful website you can visit his site http://www.targeted-traffic-site-builder.com