If you are looking for ways to increase your search engine placement to increase your affiliate commissions, then you are not alone, many affiliates want to do the same so that they can bring in greater numbers of visitors and create more money through targeted traffic increases. The free search engines are not very complicated to understand and you really need to do that before you can hope to truly increase the rankings that you currently have.

Statistically, a full sixty eight percent of search engine traffic comes from Google with about only seven and a half percent coming from MSN, and search engines as a whole are the major source of traffic online. It is extremely important that you understand how a search engine will find and present information to your potential customers if you want to increase your rankings and of course your income.

There are two ways: the first is called robots, but the far more common ways are called crawlers or spiders.

Using these spiders, search engines are able to seek out and index websites (hopefully yours). Once the spider has found your page and if everything is correct the spider will index the submitted website and index the pages. Using all the information that you entered such as website content, meta tags, and links will all be examined on your site by the spiders. Your information will be indexed in a certain areas relevant to the page content, and that is where the spider will bring them to. Linked pages will be indexed by the spider also. Because web spiders only index a limited amount, it is best to try to keep your website under hundreds of pages of unique content.

Spiders return regularly, checking out your site and seeing if there is any update or changes. The search engine moderators determine how frequently these returns happen. These spiders can be analogous to a book, in which the content, references, and table of contents all exist. Some spiders are able to index up to one million pages a day – such examples are Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

To get an improved search engine ranking, whenever someone types in keyword into the search engine, the search engine actually finds the information that is closest to what the searcher is typing in their internal index. It's not truly searching the web, so if you have a keyword such as "buy management book" in the search engine index, then your website should be in the first page of results for a searcher who types in that word. However, you will get different rankings for different search engines as they all use different search algorithms to search their indexes.

Pay special attention to the frequency and the location of the keywords that you use. Ultimately, you want a keyword density of one to two percent, so you can avoid being considered spamdexing. Another thing that search engines analyze are how the links form and what the linked pages are about. If the links to pages are related, you will see improved search engine rankings. If you want to get a better search engine placement, you need to know exactly how the search engine placement works, and then use that as a tool to help your website get better placement.