What would be the best way(beside paid inclusion) top get a decent ranking in a search engine?

My website is about a specific game, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I have tried to list everything I know about the game and specific people, but never have a good ranking.

Should I use a Meta description to include the keywords, and also the meta title?

Ex. Five TIgers: The online Romance of the Three Kingdoms resource.

Then put 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms in the meta desription a few times?

It seems that the keywords aren't doing anything for me.

Thank you in advance for suggestions.

metas do not really work as good as they used to

content content content

have as many as the search strings you can think of to be embedded in the pages as often as can be also put your page title as some search words you want

ia downloads game i like


as title The downloads for games i like site.


and also get a lot of sites to link back to you this is a better way to move up in the ranks

and it will take time time time and time again but keep at it the more pages and the more words the better

Originally posted by Sain Cai
It seems that the keywords aren't doing anything for me.Correct. :) Google, for example, doesn't use them at all. None of the search engines put much value in them anymore, simply because they were too often abused. That is, the kinds of techniques you're talking about, the search engines decided were inappropriate use. Today, there's one important guideline if you use meta keywords: don't put any word or phrase in the meta tag that doesn't also appear in the page text.

Other than that, MarcD is exactly right: content. Build a good site, create as many text-filled pages on your topic as you can, and use a link system that a search engine spider can crawl. Use text links, and use your key phrases in those links.

I wouldn't exactly agree with "have as many as the search strings you can think of to be embedded in the pages as often as can be," at least as I read it. Focus each page on one or two key phrases.

And be patient.

There's much more involved and much more to learn about search engine optimization than can be in one post or even one thread -- it's kind of like the posts here occasionally that say "I want to start a web hosting business, how do I do that?" If you don't want to become obsessed over the details and just want to build and run your site, do just that: a useful site with a good amount of on-theme text copy on well-linked pages, with a healthy number of incoming links from other sites (real sites, not link farms or FFAs) will rank fairly well.

But the biggest weakness I see most often in sites of webmasters who come to my company for a quote or help is simply a lack of content. If you don't have that, nothing else you try to do will help.