Achieving a higher search engine rank for your website will both increase traffic and increase profits.  The question is: how exactly do you get a higher search engine rank?

First: what does it mean to have a higher search engine rank?  

Search engine ranks vary for each page on your site and each keyword that is searched for.  So basically, you rank for certain keyword search terms.  To get a higher search engine rank, you need to choose a keyword phrase and optimize your page for that keyword phrase.  Each page in your site will rank differently for certain keywords.  You can use keywords to position different pages and target different sub niche markets within your niche.

Ok, so how do you get a higher search engine rank for a given page?

Optimize your page for low competition keywords.

You do not want optimize your pages for high a demand keyword like "used car" - although there are 694,272  searches for "used car", there are 9,360,000 sites competing for "used car".  Getting in the top 10 out of 9 million sites is not going to happen unless you are Ford or CarMax.  To get a higher search engine rank, find a related keyword with less competition, like, for example: "used car - Albany New York" which has over 14,000 searches and only 814 results - only 814 competitors for this exact phrase.  Now that is a keyword you can get higher search engine rank for!

As shown above: an important factor of getting a higher search engine rank for a given keyword phrase is to pick keywords that have numerous searches, but little competition.  To do this, you can use a keyword analysis tool or use free online tools such as Overture for number of searches and Google for number of results (competition).

The effect of page rank

Google's page rank (PR) will affect how well you achieve a higher search engine rank for a given keyword.  If your PR is low, your rank relative to other pages will be lower - unless you do a great job of optimizing your pages, but PR will still have an effect.  Increasing PR involves back-links, SEO and more - it is another very large subject and is not addressed here.  However, since we are shooting for low competition keywords, even a page with PR of zero can rank in the top 4 Google results.

Finding good keywords

Using a good analysis tool, like Keywords Analyzer, can help with finding in demand keywords with low competition.  But you can also spend the time and use Overture and Google.

How do you do this?  User the Overture suggestion tool to find keyword variations and then plug each variation into Google with quotes around it.  Keep track of the keywords, the number of searches from Overture and the number of results from Google in a spreadsheet.  Then sort by Google results.  You will be able to identify low competition keywords and see if they have enough searches to warrant dedicating a page to.

OR - you can save time and money using a tool like Keywords Analyzer to find low competition keywords that you can use to get a higher search engine rank.