Search Engine Ranking is a process that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. Process of improving the ranking of a website.
Search Engine Optimization is the technique of increasing the visitors traffic to your Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher Website rank is the main factor in increasing visitors traffic on your website.
Search engine positioning is the process to increase the visiblity of websites on search engine by ranking high. The higher pagerank is the main factor in increasing Search engine positioning of your website.
Meta Tags is special HTML tags that provides information about a Web page. Meta tegs also play important role in search engine indexing. Search engines considers meta tags one of the major factor while indexing your web pages. Many search engines link google, yahoo, msn, altavista etc. use this information when building their indices.
Algorithm, a methematical term, is a formula that is used by search engines to calcute the positioning of websites . every search engine has its own algorithms to display search results and algorithm changes time to time by search engines. Yahoo, Google, Msn etc use different algoritihms to show search results.
Strategies to be considered to boost link popularity & website ranking:
Link sub pages from the home page so that a search engine can transfer some link popularity to the subpages.
Anchor text(links text) should be with relevant keywords that are pointing to pages within a site. this helps link context, not link popularity.
links from websites with high Page Rank, can be one of the most powerful factor in link popularity.
Links should be from genuine websites i.e. web sites that do not use "spammy techniques" for link popularity.
To increase link popularity, many webmasters interlink multiple domains that they own, but often search engines will filter out these links, as such links are not independent votes for a page and are only created to trick the search engines