new to SEO, how do i get up the rankings in google?

Nothing is guaranteed to work, as it all depends on the keywords you are using to represent your site; it's easier to get ranked high on a less popular topic like THIMBLE COLLECTING than CREDIT CARDS but what helps is a site built well structually.

this means using DIVs as opposed to tables, using CSS to keep the formatting of your webpages clean and light for Search Engines to read.

You then need to incorporate your Keywords into Title Tags, H1, H2, etc tags as these are areas that SE's look at to understand your sites content.

Also the page name can help: thimble-collecting-advice.html as opposed to page.php?id=123

Ultimately however it is the quality of the content in the page, spend time thinkign about what to write and incorporate your keywords into that document, but don't go overboard. This will mean that when Google comes visiting it will have a well laid out site with good content.

The next thing you have to do is actually get your website on Googles radar and by naturally submitting your site to google can take months to visit and log so you can try and jump the queue by getting well ranked sites to link to you.

Imagine this as a popularity contest, if the big boys like you then google will show respect; so by having sites with strong rankings and good page ranks (say 4+) and asking them for a link to your site will help Google find you, as next time it visits them it will know about you and then come visit.

The more you change your content the more google will visit aswell...

Maybe Google visits 1x every 2 months, but next time it comes if somethings changed it may schedule to visit once a month, if it's changed again, it visits sooner - meaning websites like the BBC and CNN get visited every 10 mins or less.

There's so many factors for SEO that no 1 thing is key to helping, it's all the little things that build up to success, however start with a good foundation: well designed code that complies to W3C compliance.

W3C validator (do a search) will grade your site and point out any mistakes - baring in mind Google wants to promote quality content, any flaws in your code will go against your quality and dedication to content.

If you are having problems with big websites offering to link to yours, you can always buy links - which is called link trading and is a good short term solution to drive volumes of traffic to your site and helps Google/Yahoo/MSN spot that you exist so you can stop link trading eventually and survive on your own natural listings.

If your site is in relation to a certain topic, for example THIMBLE COLLECTING and there are sites out there like WIKI's that talk about THIMBLE COLLECTING, as long as it's not against their poilicy you could add a link to their resources provided your site is related to that topic and your inclusion of that link is to help people understand more about the topic.

I recently built a page for Energy Conservation for the local council and there was a highly ranked article on a well know Wiki site, I added my link to it (it was accepted) and about 3 weeks later my site had a google page rank of 3 which is really good going...

is there any advantage to be gained by changing the meta tags frequently?

well META TAGS are a thing of the past: don;t get me wrong there will be search engines that still use them, but the big boys like Google rely more on content than META.

They are capable of identifying the topic of your content just from the words, previously META keywords and descriptions where used to catalogue the topic of content.

I'd use META these days as a failsafe, create a new page and clearly define it in META and unless that page changes in it's nature then leave it as it.

Fantastic tools for constantly updating a page without too much effort are blogs and news feeds; with a blog as you update it like a diary, you can have a blog feed somewhere on youur pages showing the latest entries, so as soon as you change/add an article all pages receive new links and changes in content.

You should also sign upto Google Webmaster and generate a google sitemap; with the google site map you can create lots of pages rich in content that don;t necessarily live or are accessed in your main navigation, instead they are only know about via google, but these pages still contain your main navigation so users who find the content can still travel around your site...

HMM what else... breadcrumbs!

breadcrumbs are great, they define a path from the current page back up to the main root - so users never get lost (hence breadcrumb name) but if a search engine randomly finds this page, it can filter up through the breadcrumbs to find more content. as it filters up and down the crumbs it receives content devoted to the links it finds: eg...

home > FOOTBALL > EVERTON

from the home page we have generic content about the site, but then theres an article on football, google sees theres info on football and theres another link about everton, so anyone looking for info about everton football club will get sent straight into the relevant info because google has managed to digest, understand and filter out relevant content.

you can also look at aggregator sites like de.licio.us who are massive link sites pointing people to content; if you find your website has a relevant article then submit it to these bookmark sites; that way you increase the chance of people finding your site, but also when google visits the bookmark site it finds yet another popular site wanting to link to you and you get more respect and rank...

is it best to generate new content pages like this

www.manutd.com/united_win_the_champions_league.html

instead of ww.manutd.com/latestnews.html?

Anyway - hope that gives you a better insight to it all. Well and truly deserved my points on that :0D

look forward to receiving them.

Here is a fantastic article on SEO for beginners that I highly recommend you read.  It should help get your started in the right direction.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-1-page