In 2007, website owners need all the help they can get to rank well in the search engines.

Over the years, the search engines have evolved in many ways. In the 90's and early 2000's, if you wanted a top search engine ranking, you could simply repeat your keywords over and over on your website until you had the "optimal" keyword density percentage. Next you would submit your site to the search engines and, chances are, you'd soon find your website ranking highly for nearly any word you wanted.

Long gone are those days.

In 2007, the keys to getting a top search engine ranking in Google, Yahoo, and MSN are...

1. Intensely studying your competition (those websites that currently rank high for your keywords). You need to truly analyze everything about your competition's website. There are literally hundreds of bits of information that are crucial to knowing about your competition, if you're truly seeking to outrank them in the search engines.

2. Once you've thoroughly studied your competition, it's time to take what you've learned and, to the best of your ability, try to duplicate their success. Think about it for a minute... To rank websites in order from "best to worst", the search engines are looking for very particular criteria.