Criteria for Ranking
Each search engine is likely to have its own particular criteria for rankings, so it's important to cultivate unique strategies rather than an all-encompassing plan. Spamming and submitting the same information repeatedly will not earn you a top position and is likely to get you discounted completely. That's why so-called free automatic submission services are not worth it. Approach them with caution.

Suppose you want users searching for "northumberland bed and breakfasts" to find your site among the first 20 sites retrieved. Simply adding, removing, or changing a few sentences on your homepage can alter the way search spiders index your site. The higher the listing appears on the result pages, the more confident the search engine is that the site listed matches the search query that was entered. The rating is generated by an algorithmic equation that measures the site against the concept described in the query.

Simple design tip: relegate unrelated topics to subsidiary pages. If you're advertising your northumberland bed and breakfast, don't use the homepage to emphasize price, the way the sea looks from a bedroom window, or your famous local sausages. Instead, emphasize bed, breakfast, northumberland, and holiday/vacation, or something similar.

What is 'Spamming' and could it help get my position higher?
Yes it could, but the risk is too great. Spamming techniques are various, and the term is most commonly used to describe the process of sending unsolicited e-mails (the term Spam came from a song made famous by the British comedy show, Monty Python's Flying Circus).

In the context of search engines, it is used to describe any deliberate attempt to manipulate search engine indexing, to gain an unfair advantage over your competitors.

An example could be the repetitive use of keywords in your body text, masked from the viewer by setting the text color to the same color as the background, or repetitive submission of the same pages to the same search engine.

Search engine programmers are wise to the techniques of spammers, and will drop your site from their listing if you are caught. There are always legitimate ways to reach a good result, they sometimes take a little longer! See also Criteria for Ranking.