As you can see, a search engine ranking is crucial to driving traffic to your website. Granted, there are other ways to bring in visitors, but organic search engine placements are by far the best and cheapest way to do it. In this article, we will be looking at ways to increase a site ranking on Google. The steps themselves are simple enough and do not require any special skills. All you need is the drive to implement these techniques, a lot of perseverance and bags of patience as you wait for your website to climb up the rankings. Why Google But why the emphasis on Google? There are a number of established names out there, such as Yahoo and MSN. Besides, getting listed and ranked on these search engines is a quicker and more straightforward process than Google. The answer is quite simple: market share. When people look for information online, chances are they're using Google. According to Nielsen, a leading Analytics company, 55 per cent of all online searches in the United States are conducted on Google. This is more than double that of its closest competitor, Yahoo, at 25 per cent. MSN is a distant third with only a 10 per cent of the search engine market share. Outside the United States, the statistics are even higher: Google search garners over 75 per cent of all searches in the UK, 80 per cent in Australia and a whooping 90 per cent in Germany.