Being at the top of search engine results is crucial to success on the internet, but how do you get there?

Privacy advocates were up in arms in August 2006 when AOL published the internet search history of half a million of its users. In a public relations disaster for the once dominant internet company, journalists quickly tracked down individual AOL users purely on their search activities.

While the action was at best ill-advised, it did ultimately serve its original purpose - providing a useful set of data about the search activities of a random sub-set of internet users.

The data confirmed that internet users rarely go past the first page of search results to find what they are looking for. The top search result receives 43.3 per cent of all click-throughs, falling to 11.9 per cent for second and 8.4 per cent for third place.

The implication for businesses hoping to drive a significant amount of new business from search engines is that unless you are number one when people search for your product or service, you can forget about getting any meaningful level of referrals from Google, Yahoo and the rest.

Just as the bulk of the traffic is driven by the top three search results, local industry experts confirm that Google is the main show in town. Anthony Quigely, managing director of Online-marketing.ie says he laughs when he sees companies advertising services to submit websites to thousands of search engines.

"There is only one and a few bit players outside that," says Quigley. "It's Google and the rest, and Yahoo makes up the majority of the rest."

Google has software programs known as spiders which index the web by following links between sites and analysing the pages they encounter.

There is actually no need to submit your site to Google for inclusion in its search results. The Googlebot, as it is known, will find your pages provided they are linked from other sites.

It will then analyse their content and apply its closely guarded algorithms, the complex set of rules it applies to automatically establish the relevance and usefulness of web pages to searchers.

Although it is possible to devote a huge amount of resources to optimising a website for search engines, the advice from the experts is that there are a number relatively straight forward things that you can do to improve your ranking.

The first thing you need to do is establish what words or phrases that people are likely to be searching for in order to find a site like yours. These key words may not always be the phrases you would expect. For example, although Ryanair and EasyJet refer to themselves as low-cost airlines, web users will search for "cheap flights" rather than "low-cost airlines".

Google actually provides a tool to help you figure out what keywords you should be looking to rank highly for.

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool (http://tinyurl.com/qkfuh) lets you enter the address of your site after which it will suggest keywords or, alternatively, you can enter a phrase and see what related terms are being searched for.

While establishing your keywords and including them on your site is essential and will help you rise up the search engine rankings, it's important not to lose site of your users.

"Optimisation is not everything - the site still needs to be usable by your customers," says Cathy McGovern, director of Inspiration Marketing.

Just how far people can go down the route of optimising for Google is highlighted by an amusing but accurate animation which shows how Google's own crisp interface would be littered with additional content if it was designed to rank highly in its own search results (http://tinyurl.com/2fo8q6).

Google also offers sites that have regularly updated content. A simple way to do that is to include a blog on your site which allows you to write about your company. Free and open source platforms such as Wordpress can easily be integrated into a website design, allowing anyone who can use a word processor to quickly add new content to their site.

"It's very easy to Google your industry, get the latest news and then comment on it on your blog," says McGovern. "It's free and relevant so you are getting a double benefit."

Page titles - the text that appears in the blue bar at the top of your web browser when viewing a page - are also extremely important.

The keyword for the particular page should be included in the title as should the company name and the product or service being discussed.

"You should put the company name after the key word if you are not a highly branded company," advises Richard Hearne from internet consultancy Red Cardinal.

The most important "off-page" activity is getting in-bound links to your site. Links from other websites are worth their weight in gold.

One of the great innovations that Google introduced was ranking websites based on the number and quality of in-bound links it has. While the number of sites linking to you is important, it should be noted that not all links are equal and Google gives more weighting to links from influential people or organisations in your sector.

Quigley gives the example of someone looking to buy a piano. You may ask a number of your friends for a recommendation and get an equal number of shops suggested.

"But if I had any oomph about me I would ask the College of Music where they buy their pianos," says Quigley. "If they say McCullough Piggots the deal is done."

He advises companies to figure out who the equivalent of the College of Music is in their sector and then get them to link to their site.

McGovern advises installing the Google toolbar in your web browser as this displays the Google Page Rank of every site you visit on a scale of 0 to 10. (Interestingly Red Cardinal has a Page Rank of 6, Inspiration gets 5, while Online-marketing.ie is ranked a 4.). Ideally you want to be linked by sites with a high Page Rank.

Hearne also points out that the text, known as anchor text, that other sites use to link to you is also important. A link that reads "To see my favourite Dublin hotel, click here" is less valuable than "this is my favourite Dublin hotel".

He advises leveraging your network of "friendlies" - customers and suppliers - who are much more likely to link using the anchor text that you ask them to use.

Another easy way to create inward links to your sites is by commenting on other blogs - if you include your web address this will be hyperlinked from your comment on the blog.

Richard Hearne points out that by publishing your own blog you are much more likely to attract links to your site. "Blogs are imminently more linkable than a flat corporate site," he says.

"If you read a good comment on a blog, you will be much more likely to link to it from your own site."

Since 2001, when Google introduced targeted advertising that is displayed when a chosen keyword is searched for, a perennial question has been whether or not it is required to advertise in order to rank highly in the so-called "organic" results.

"It's a case of 'never the twain shall meet' and I have never seen any evidence of it," says Quigley. Despite this, he advises clients to advertise with Google as he believes it increases their branding.

Hearne points out that AdWords delivers an instant boost in traffic while optimising your site to rank highly in the organic results can take a lot longer to pay off.

But he cautions that phrases which are likely to attract a lot of competitive interest from other bidders, eg "Dublin hotels" can easily end up costing anywhere between €1 and double-digit euro amounts for every Google user that clicks through to your site from the ad.

The main issue for companies with limited resources is that Google is a moving target as it is constantly tweaking its methods to ensure it is producing the most relevant results for searchers.

In the past, Google used to make major changes to its algorithms every 9 to 12 months, an event known in the industry as "The Google Slap", but as the technology has matured big disruptions are less likely these days.

One of the most likely ways to go down the rankings is to try and second guess the system or manipulate the search results. German car maker BMW is the most high profile company yet to be blacklisted by Google for such activities.

Last year it was revealed that BMW had been presenting different pages to the Google web spider than those that an actual web user would end up on when doing a search. Google responded by reducing its page rank to zero - effectively ensuring that BMW.de would be ranked at the bottom of any search results.

"Google is getting much better at recognising odd activities," says Quigley, who points out that his consultancy does not engage in 'black hat' optimisation. "It's not possible to game the system and get away with it any more."