Reid Goldsborough spoke thusly...

It's interesting that with some search phrases that have commercial
connections, such as "coin grading" and "coin holders," the relevant
sites I've put together don't even wind up on the first page of
Google's results. For instance, with "coin grading" it's the
individual coin grading services that dominate, and with "coin
holders" it's the coin holder companies. It's a commercial Web out
there, more and more. But this doesn't of course prevent anybody from
putting up a noncommercial site, simply to share information.

There is a whole science surrounding google results (also used by yahoo
and aol searches). I have read up quite a few things and learned some
tricks over the past few months.

The bigger sites (and those are often commercial) have a definite
advantage over smaller sites because of something called page rank
(basically page rank is a representation of how many sites link to a
particular site). A site like PCGS may have a PR of 6, mine has a PR of
4. That means that PCGS is much more likely, overall, to be ranked
higher than my site for a particular keyword...especially a generic
keyword like 'Coin' or something similar.

One of the ways to get around this and get better ranking is to target
specific groups of keywords and put them in your page title (and hope a
site with a higher page rank doesn't have the same keywords in their
title).

For example, my museum stuff is targeted to collectors and non-
collectors looking for prices and general information so I have set up
the titles to be Coin Design - Price, Value, History, and Grade
Information.

That helps get the pages high for searches like Bust Dollar Value or
Bust Dollar Information or Bust Dollar Price even though I don't do
particularly well for just 'Bust Dollar'. I don't reach number one all
the time for each series but I do typically get in the first few links
for each series with those type of searches (history, price, value,
etc).

There are many more tips for helping your search engine ranking (such as
keyword density, navigation structure, etc) but inbound links (Page
Rank) and page titles are two ways that I have found very important.
Page titles are easy and something you have direct control over. Links
are more difficult and take time but are very important too.

--
Stujoe
The Stujoe Collection: Coin Grading, News, Forums and more...
http://www.TheStujoeCollection.com/forums