While all of the major search engines use different algorithms, the end goal of all three is the same: to provide the searcher with the most relevant results available. It is this one common thread that makes it possible for an SEO to rank a website highly across all the major engines. While there are a variety of factors at play and an even wider variation in the weight each of these factors are given – the possible variations that can produce relevant results are limited.

To rank highly on MSN one needs to build a solid sized site (exactly how large will depend on your industry – look at the size of your competitors' sites for an idea), a relevant theme throughout the site that focuses on your primary keywords and a good number of links. MSN doesn't (at this time) employ an aging delay on links such as the one employed by both Google and Yahoo! so the effects of the site and inbound links can be picked up very quickly and with good SEO efforts one can rank well within a few months on MSN for competitive phrases.

SEO for Yahoo! - Until recently Yahoo! acted very much like MSN, but now it's leaning a bit more towards Google. Ranking a website well on Yahoo! requires a solid-sized site with unique content and a very good number of links.

While PageRank is a Google factor, Yahoo! does have some type of page value factor at play. Many moons ago Yahoo! was playing with a PageRank-like calculation called WebRank. They even went so far as to put out a beta toolbar testing it. This indicates that there is a factor at play in the Yahoo! algorithm similar to Google's PageRank – they just don't advertise what a specific page's value is.

Yahoo! is placing a fair amount of emphasis on the age of links though not in the same way that Google is. We will get to Google shortly, however to understand what to expect from Yahoo! one must understand that when you get a link to your website it won't deliver its full value for a number of months. While the exact number of months in unknown, it appears to be around 8 before it delivers its full weight, though it will hold some weight from day one and this weight will increase as time passes.

To rank well on Yahoo!, you must optimize your site similar to what you would do for MSN and you must build a large number of inbound links and have patience as these links age. You will not see a sudden spike 2 weeks after a large link-building campaign. You will likely have to wait 3-4 months to notice any significant effect.

SEO For Google - Virtually every webmaster and website owner is primarily concerned about attaining Google rankings because of the significantly higher number of searchers using it. Provided that you are building your website following the best practices of SEO (i.e. unique content, a sizable amount of content, and a good number of incoming links), then your rankings are sure to follow. However, because of the aging delay it will likely take longer than for MSN or Yahoo! Google considers the age of your links, your domain and even the individual page to be factors, and the longer your page has been online the better.

Essentially, ranking a site on Google requires that you take the same actions as for the other two, continue your link building efforts on an ongoing basis to ensure that you end up with more-and-more links, and that you update your content and add content on a fairly regular basis (through the addition of a blog for example).

Tying It Together - The logical process for a new website or one at the first stages of SEO is to first target MSN. At this point, you can focus your attention on continuing to build high-quality, relevant links to, and content on, your site which will continue to increase your value on Yahoo! and Google.

Analysis will be required to determine exactly what weight you will be giving to different areas. For example, if your onsite factors are optimized for MSN, then you know that you will need to make up for this in the offsite factors for Yahoo! and Google. If you figured you would need 100 links to rank on Google, then you will now need to up that number to account for the fact that you have optimized your site for a different engine.

During the analysis process you will likely want to use a tool to speed up the process of keyword density analysis and competitor link analysis. At Beanstalk we use a tool called Total Optimizer Pro though there are others out there (note: I have yet to find one that does what this one does as quickly and easily).

Conclusion - I am hoping that none of you read the title and were expecting to rank on the first page of all three major engines next week. Ranking highly on all three major engines takes time, patience and a good few rounds of tweaking to get the perfect balance of onsite and offsite optimization. Of course, as you can gather, done properly it's well worth the effort.

For ease of setup and configuration, manufacturers ship wireless routers with all security disabled. Therein lies the problem. If you do not take any further steps to secure your router, and a surprising number of people don't, your network will be wide open to all passersby and strangers. It's like you've hung out a sign, "The door is open. Please come in and help yourself."

The good news is that it is relatively easy to secure your wireless router. Here are three basic steps you should take.

1. Password Protect the Access to Your Router's Internal Configuration - To access your router's internal setup, open a browser and enter the routers setup URL. The URL will be specified in the manual. The URLs for D-Link and Linksys routers, two major manufacturers of wireless routers, are http://192.168.0.1 and http://192.168.1.1, respectively.

For Linksys routers, leave the user name blank and type "admin" (without the quotes) in the password field and press enter. To change the password, simply click on the Password tab and enter your new password.

For other routers, please consult your manual. Alternately, you can search on the Internet with the term "default login for". Don't be surprised to find quite a number of pages listing default login parameters for many different routers, even uncommon ones.

2. Change the Default SSID (Service Set IDentifier) - The SSID is the name of a WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network). All wireless devices on a WLAN use SSIDs to communicate with each other.

Routers ship with standard default SSIDs. For example, the default SSID for Linksys routers is, not unsurprisingly, "Linksys". As you can see, if you don't change the default SSID of your router a would-be intruder armed with a few common SSIDs from major manufacturers will be able to find your wireless network quite easily.

To change the SSID, click on the Wireless tab. Look for an input item labeled SSID. It will be near the top. Enter a new name for network. Don't use something like "My Network". Use a name that is be hard to guess.

3. Disable SSID Broadcast - Wireless enabled computers use network discovery software to automatically search for nearby SSIDs. Some of the more advanced software will query the SSIDs of nearby networks and even display their names. Therefore, changing the network name only helps partially to secure your network. To prevent your network name from being discovered, you must disable SSID broadcast.

In the same screen that you changed the name of your network, you will see options for SSID broadcast. Choose "Disable SSID" to make your network invisible. Now save all your settings and log out.

Since your wireless network is now invisible, you will have to configure your computers to connect to your wireless network using the new name. On Windows XP, start by clicking on the wireless icon in the Notification Area and proceed from there.

With these three steps, your network now has basic security. However, if you keep sensitive information on your computers, you may want to secure your wireless network even further. For example, you can:

Turning on encryption is a two-step process. First you configure your router to use encryption using an encryption key of your choice. And then, you configure your computer to use the encryption key. The actual process of configuring your router for encryption varies from router to router. Please consult the router's manual.

There are even stronger methods for ensuring security. A strong and robust security method is RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial In User Service). Using RADIUS requires additional hardware and software. However, there are companies that offer RADIUS security as a subscription based service. The fees are reasonable and dropping.

Therefore for example, if you run a business on your wireless network, have sensitive data on your computers such as credit card information, and have a number of users who access your network, you should consider using RADIUS. Since the service sector for RADIUS is dynamic and growing, a search on the Internet with terms like "RADIUS subscription" or "RADIUS service" is probably the best way to locate one.

And since it is even harder to read text on a monitor than it is on paper, we must all be especially careful with the colors we choose for our websites, or suffer less-than-optimal site traffic and repeat visitors.

Color choice should also be dictated by other, less obvious goals, when designing or re-vamping a website. It's important to realize that different colors invoke different emotions, are associated with specific concepts and say different things in each society. For instance, green often times is associated with freshness or money, which is fairly obvious if you think about it. But every color does this, and some of the emotions and concepts are more subtle. For example, white means pure, easy, or goodness and purple can be associated with royalty or sophistication. What's more, each color carries with it both positive and negative ideas. The emotions and concepts that you associate with specific colors may differ from other people's associations, but there are themes that run throughout each color. Here are some:

Not only do colors evoke emotions, but they can communicate messages or concepts too. For example, look at ClickItTicket.com to see how color is used to communicate the new affiliation between Oak Web Works, LLC and ClickitTicket.com. The blues of Oak Web Works's logo swirl into the reds of ClickitTicket.com's logo. This can be interpreted as a melding of the two organizations, which is what the words underneath say, "in affiliation with". Also, the red of OakWebWorks.com indicates action and passion, two essentials for people who want to attend theater, sporting events or concerts Another online ticket website, BestShowTicketsLasVegas.com, has a different color approach. Its main colors are blue and purple, giving the site a comforting, secure and sophisticated feel. The main header on each page has all the colors in the rainbow in it, a collage of images, with the word `Tickets' in large, white font. Much of the site is white too, which gives it a clean feel.

As a general rule of thumb, when Oak Web Works designs websites, one primary color and one secondary or complimentary color will be chosen. These colors are based on the specific audience and market of our client and the messages the client wants to communicate to the rest of the world. If more than two or three colors are used, things tend to look a little messy, and the power of any one color is diluted too much, so we most often stick with two colors.

When I am not sure exactly which colors or combinations to use, I often start trying different things, then take a step back and ask myself what my chosen colors are conveying to me. After designing many websites over the years I have realized that going with my gut has often worked when I'm in doubt. You would be surprised at how creative and accurate your intuition can be.

However, if the client already has an established brand, we will always make sure to match the colors of the website with the original colors of the company. It is not wise to have print collateral material one color and the website a totally unrelated color. All marketing channels need to remain consistent, with one face only.

Since website visitors all have different platforms, different monitors, and different settings for their screen resolutions, the colors you choose for your website may not always be rendered the exact same way on your site visitors' monitors. That's why there are "Web Safe" colors that have a much higher likelihood of looking the exact same regardless of the user's computer, monitor or settings. Many graphics programs, including Adobe Photoshop, have a feature that allows you to choose "Web Safe" colors only.

Keep in mind however, that the sophistication of technology today allows for Web designers to be able to stray from the "Web Safe" colors more and more. So don't be overly concerned if you choose to use "un-safe' Web colors, chances are that most of your audience has the computers necessary to view your site the exact way you intended.

Whether you are designing sites for clients or designing your own business website, your color choice is vital. Be sure to try different colors, different shades, and different combinations before you decide. It's a lot of fun playing with colors but every choice you make comes with a set of pre-defined societal meanings and emotions, so choose with deliberate care.

More on colors, "Color and Design for the Non-Designer", "Lesson on Colors" or "Psychology of Colors", Take the Color Survey, www.ColorMatters.com and www.colorcom.com ... AND Visabone Color Chart

There are many types of navigation methods to choose from. You must carefully consider the layout of your site so you can choose the system that will work best. You want to make it easy for your visitors to find their way around and not frustrate them in the process. You need to keep it consistent across all pages of your site, with some standards like the placement of your logo (which is generally in the upper left hand corner of your website) linking back to your home page.

A general statement to answer the above questions is that "magic numbers do not exist." The most important thing you can understand as a search engine optimization expert is that algorithms change. Just when you think you understand what is going to make you number one for a keyphrase in a search engine, something could easily change, and you might have to spend months or even years trying to figure the new algorithm.

It is better not to try to reverse engineer the algorithm, do something much easier instead... observe your top competitors. All you need to do is to understand what elements your competitors are using to make them rank in the top positions.

The main elements to getting top search engines rankings are:

Part of the observation should be not only what the links say, but where the links come from. Think about what the category is that those links come from. If you start to see a recurring pattern, you should start actively searching for links coming from that category.

Some marketers use special software for robotic content creation. They generate thousands of pages with links pointing to their sites. This practice can be very dangerous, as Google will penalize unnatural linking or violations of their terms of service. And what happens is that those links do not look natural. One day one site may have 50 links and the following day have 2000 links, which all say the same thing and come from the same IP address.

If you understand how to observe, this will never happen to you. You will learn how to look at your competitors, and observe how they are getting linked to. Then, just do what they do.

Fresh Quality Content - The second thing to observe is how much fresh content the top sites have. Search engines love quality relevant content that is added and updated frequently. You will probably notice that the top sites in your niche have many articles and other quality content, and are continuously adding new content to their sites.

People that surf the web are usually searching for information, so content is the "fuel" of internet traffic. If you want to attract many potential customers to your site, then you need to make sure that you provide enough content which is relevant to their interests. Updating it frequently with more quality content will keep visitors coming back to your website over and over again.

Keyword Density - The third thing you need to observe is the keyword density of your competitors. How many times should you repeat your main keywords? In which part of the web page should your main keywords be mentioned? Again, there is no magic number, it's all about observing and measuring against the top websites in your market. But what should you measure?

Again, your keyword density needs to look natural; otherwise you may fail in overall optimization. This is when you use keywords too often or too little. If you look unnatural, your rankings will suffer as a result.

So, what did we learn here? Basically that the key to ranking highly in the search engines is to understand what the top 5 websites in your niche are doing and to apply this to your own website optimization.

What do you do now? Get out there and start getting inbound links for your site. Add quality content to your site daily. And be sure that your on-site optimization, such as keyword density, is similar to that of your top competitors. Continue to do this every day and you will be ranking at the top of the search engines before you know it.

To succeed with Google going forward, you absolutely must structure your incoming links to appear as natural as possible: You should focus your efforts on having links from many different sites with a wide range of PageRank and spread across a large number of IP addresses; Your anchor text should not be identical on every link; Your site must have a reasonably high ratio of deep links ;links to internal pages within your site; and, your incoming links should be embedded within the content of the linking page and not isolated somewhere obscure like a footer or sidebar.

Google Sitemaps Adds Stats - What if you could tell Google when to crawl your site, lead their spider directly to new content, and give them a description to use on your dynamic URLs? Well, that's the concept behind Google's Sitemaps Beta. Google Sitemaps Stats offers you...Sitemap details and errors, Indexing information about your site, Query stats about your site, Crawl stats about your site, Page analysis of your site and A list of your site URLs that Google was unable to crawl, and why.

Having recently acquired Urchin, Google released Google Analytics this past month. After adding some much-needed improvements to Urchin (such as a browser overlay, visitor segmentation, dashboards, and roles-based reporting), Google integrated the new application into their AdWords account. Suddenly there's a viable web analytics tool that's powered by Google's massive resources.

MSN - MSN is now showing results pulled from MSN shopping at the top of its search results for some product related searches.

AOL - Yahoo dropped out of the running to purchase AOL this month leaving Google, Comcast, and MSN as the remaining contenders.

Yahoo! - Yahoo updated their index this month but, in comparison to the drama that was Google's update Jagger, this update was fairly low-key. It was mostly a spam-sweep to clean up their index a bit and it appears that none of our sites nor any of our client's sites nor even any of our subscriber's sites were affected by this update.