Are you puzzled as to why one site will rank better than another? Each search engine has what is called an algorithm and it is what determines where a site gets placed in the ranks and where it shows up in searches.
This plain fact is the one most basic fact of all in search engine marketing. The algorithm is software, nothing more than that, it is mathematical in nature and scores sites based on many different things within each web page. Just about everything on your site can be scored and how the algorithm scores your site will make you show up high in the ranks or perhaps not at all.
Take some time to really get to understand this, it is important and should help you see your way through all the things that need to be done in order to make your site rank well. This will not happen quickly, you need to be patient because you need to spend the time to do this right, and the engines take their time getting to you, and then indexing you. To start off work with the code on your site to optimize it, and then take on the content.
Back in the early days of SEO, and actually before that, a lot was based on the code used on the side. We always made for proper use of code, the title tag, and keyword used in heading tags and other font emphasis methods.
Times have changed and although it is still imperative that you have a properly coded website there are many other more important things to focus in on. Go page by page through your site and update everything for proper use of CSS. Next things to do can be your keyword density, navigation and title tags. You want to have a long look at your navigation and ensure that it is easy for the engines, and also your users, to find their way around the site and to every single page you have.
Navigation is extremely important to have set up so that it is obvious how to get around your site, if it isn't people will probably not even try to figure out how to move around the site. It is imperative that your navigation is simple, easy to understand and use and is in plain sight. It is really easy to lose a visitor if they can't figure out your navigation. They will close the window or click back and be gone. Once your site is settled you need to get onto inbound links from other sites.
Always use your most important key phrases, and keywords, as the anchor text of the inbound links you can control. This article isn't enough to really get into inbound linking, it is incredibly complicated and involved. I have a lot more information about this on my site, and of course in the free SEO course. Way beyond what we briefly have touched on here. All the engines today look at links from other sites as being a "vote" in favor of your site.
The engines understand that it is not the easiest thing in the world to get someone to visit our sites, therefore it stands to reason that if we send them to another site it must be for a good reason. Everything the engines find gets scored and these inbound links do as well. The algorithms are complicated but they take all these scores and break them down into sections and then score our sites accordingly.
Relevancy counts. If the site that an inbound comes from is about the same thing your site is about then that link will be seen more favorably than one from an irrelevant site. So we want to do everything we can to get links pointing in at us from sites that are relevant to us.
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