"Content is king," should be every web designer's mantra. The slogan should be glued to your monitor, your medicine cabinet, and your forehead, so you can read it every morning when you look in the mirror. While it might be tempting to focus on page titles and meta tags, without good content, you're site will be dead in the water.

Keywords need to be reflected in your page's content. That means you need actual HTML text on your page. Search engines rely on visible content for their ranking determinations, so keyword-rich body text is incredibly important. If your site has text that appears as a graphic - or if it's brimming with cool-looking flash animations - you'll hobble your chances for a top search engine positioning. Some search engines will index ALT text and comment information, along with meta tags, but to play it safe, always use HTML text whenever possible

Another thing to remember when writing content, is that longer is better. It's easier to write keyword-dense text when you keep your page length to at least 250 words. Writing short paragraphs, including sub headlines and integrating keyword-rich bullet points will enhance usability and help to increase search engine positioning.

So if you've tweaked your tags, fiddled with your page titles and included your keywords but still find you're being ranked poorly, try re-authoring your site: add a dose of rich original content focused on one central theme. All things being equal, a site with high quality content will always achieve a higher search engine placement than a site with less content. Furthermore, if you write content that will actually be interesting and useful to your visitors, they will stay longer, your site will become more popular and will do better in search engine results in the long term.

Finally, always remember to update your pages. Both search engines and visitors alike appreciate up-to-date content over stale content. If visitors view your site two or three times over a two month period and nothing has changed, they probably aren't coming back.