What are your best search engine placement tips?

I agree with everything that has been said, however I do believe link building can be a very strong tool. I have plenty of clients, as well as friends, that utilize QUALITY CONTENT SITES for their link building. Involving back linking to your website and landing pages helps to mediate traffic to targeted and controlled areas of your website.

It also helps with reporting and tracking!

Jeff, do you have similar sites where you did not do that to compare the results to? I'm curious.

Think prominence of the keywords in all things.

Sorry Brian.
On page work is the driving factor since Google updated with Caffeine.
URL, Title, the visual display of relevance and hierarchy are the ranking factors.

Google says that relevance goes beyond exact match and keyword densities now to silo density and synonym densities. Latent Semantic Indexing is in full force.

Links are only good to build PR. (PageRank).
The more links you have, the higher your PageRank,
The higher your PageRank, the more often your pages are crawled.
The more often your pages are crawled, the sooner your new information hits the index.
The more information you have indexed, the more chances at getting top positions, each page is a new ranking opportunity.
The more on topic pages you have linked in the "silo", the higher your relevance.
The higher your relevance, the better chance that your indexing efforts get at a top ranking page.

Linking has little effect in search results positioning.
The proof of this is that a low PR page can outrank a higher PR one.
Links are only one factor out of over 200 that are considered in the Google algorithm.

best,
Reg
nbs-seo.com

Larry,
Glad to see someone agree. :) It is amazing how much linking is promoted to the exclusion of on-page work.

I have published new content on a brand new domain PR0 and had it beat PR4 sites.
Only ONE link to the site was needed.

Not only has linking and search positions changed but Google has totally changed it's method of calculating PageRank. This is a major, core algo change.

It used to be, the amount of PR the linked page would get was based on a percentage of the linking page's PR divided by the number of out bound links on the page.

Now it is based on the relevance between linked and linking pages.
Over the course of a few months I built my (new May 15) http://nbs-seo.com site to a PR4 and the great majority of the 115 links were placed on PR0 topical discussion pages like this one.

I also have a PR3 website with 5 times the amount of links as my PR4.

Choosing where to link is not based on the PR of the linking site anymore, it is based on the relevance of the content.

best,
Reg

Somebody does not like our answers Larry.. ;-)

Wow.. get a clue guys.. Anyone want to have a contest?

I will give you a new page to promote through links and I will publish a new page with only one link.

Links build traffic and have little to no effect on search positions.
Place your keyphrases in the header in h1 tags and secondary headings in the left column in h2 and anchor text.
Open your man page with a related h2.

To find keywords you can use the Google PPC keyword tool which is wildly inaccurate or something like wordtracker which samples a much smaller database.

Look up synonyms to your keywords and use them in the copy.

best,
Reg

I agree with Reg. I've never focused on link building and all my clients' pages are at the top, if that means anything.