Are you fed up with Google? No good positions there even after months of work? Well, maybe you should start a little smaller and try to optimize your website for the MSN and Yahoo search engines first. Although they are a lot smaller than Google they still can send much valuable traffic and, the most important thing is, they are much easier to manipulate with some clever SEO work. In this article I will show you exactly which steps are needed to probably (of course I can't promise you results) greatly improve your rankings on the "2nd-tier" search engines.

On Page Optimization

So called "On Page Optimization" is the part of SEO you can change directly on your website (in the html code) like the title and headings. And although Google hardly cares for them they are very important if you want to rank well in Yahoo and MSN because those search engines lay much more weight on these factors. ere is a little overview over the most important ones:

The title: You should use your most important keywords in your tag as it's probably weighted the most. The best thing is to leave out any other words here.

h1, h2, h3: The headings are nearly as important, Use your keywords here again, but in a sentence structure.
alt, title, strong, b: It's not proven that those help with your rankings, but many people claim it, and using them can certainly not hurt.

Off Page Optimization

Like with Google, the most important thing to rank well in Yahoo and MSN are also incoming links. The difference however seems to be that those two care much more for quantity than for quality of the links. This knowledge can be easily used for your advantage, for example by using one of the link exchange programs like http://www.link-vault.com or http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/. Those will build very many links to your site in no time and therefore fool Yahoo and MSN.

If you did both things, optimized your webpages and built links to your site using one of the mentioned tools you can probably expect increased rankings on the search engines. At least it always worked for me and my websites this way.