Title: What Do Search Engines Really Want? Word Count: 513 Summary: If you go strictly by the numbers, Yahoo, MSN and Google are the "Big 3" of search engines and directories. Everyone who creates a site wonders how to get traffic to their newly created site, this is the most important question every new webmaster asks, is how to do this. In the past it was very easy to get your website ranked in the search engines, all you needed to do was stuff keywords into your site that you wanted to rank high with, stuff the meta tags and wait for t... Keywords: search engines,serps,page rank,link popularity,one way links,reciprocal link exchange,link exchange Article Body: If you go strictly by the numbers, Yahoo, MSN and Google are the "Big 3" of search engines and directories. Everyone who creates a site wonders how to get traffic to their newly created site, this is the most important question every new webmaster asks, is how to do this. In the past it was very easy to get your website ranked in the search engines, all you needed to do was stuff keywords into your site that you wanted to rank high with, stuff the meta tags and wait for the search engines to index the page and in a couple of days your site was in the top 10-20 in the search engines results. This worked very well because your site was stuffed with the keywords you wanted to the visitors to find on the search engines. This is not the case anymore, now you need links pointing to your site, content, optimization, and the proper keywords Fresh content is very important in terms of search engine optimization. For example, a page that has its content updated daily will find that search engine crawls the page more often than the other less active pages. Adding more fresh content to your site is very important since it keeps the search engines coming back to your site. When a search engine finds your site it follows all of your links on your page, it will index other pages on your site and follow the links to other sites to index other webmaster sites pages. The key to any real success in seo is in approaching the task in the mindset that the search engine is at least as good as a human at reviewing, appraising and listing your site. People pay SEO firms to optimize their websites and they pay them a lot of money, remember once you start with an SEO firm you will need to continue to keep your ranking on the search engines. Make sure you avoid linking to other webmaster that are not ethical, if you link to someone who the search engines ban it might effect your rankings on the search engine. Try to get other websites that are relevant and that already appear in the search engines to link to your website. Indexing is when a web crawler or spider goes thru your site and reviews all the relevant keywords, links, and information contained on your site. Not surprisingly, they often rank very highly when you search for relevant words To build links many webmasters use directories, article directories and reciprocal link exchanges and some more advanced webmasters use affiliate programs. Individuals who place their website links on web directories have a better shot at obtaining higher search engine ranking. There are a few different reasons why search engines place a high value on the web directories which are human-edited. Humans take the time to review the links and the sites making the directory link a reliable link which is approved. Place your websites link on many directories as you can, one of the most important directories is dmoz.