This is a great mystery to a lot of people, and it really shouldn’t be. In fact, it’s quite easy. First, you have to make sure your site is optimized for the search engines to visit. If you know HTML, this can be very easy. If not, this will be very hard (so go learn HTML!)

What You Really Want To Hear

Ok, now lets talk about what you really want to hear – how to get those coveted 1-10 rankings for your keywords. The first thing to do in order to raise your site rank is target specific keywords. I say specific, because you need to target “keyphrases,” meaning more than one word keywords. Some people use the words interchangeably (me included) so just ignore one-word keywords altogether. You will waste your money if you shoot for these, because chances are, there are other, MUCH larger companies who already have you beat, and will continue to have you beat unless you’ve got a bottomless wallet.

Meta Tags

Title and Meta tags were once the only things you had to have on your site to get listed well in the major search engines. The spider would come to your site, check out your Meta tags, and you’d be listed for your keywords. Although it’s not that easy anymore, meta tags are still very important.

There are 2 Meta tags that you will want to have on EVERY page. First, the keywords tag: <meta name=”keywords” content=”your keywords | second keyword | like this”>

Note that I separated them with the pipe symbol – | – that keeps your keywords separated while still allowing the search engines to tell them apart. You can also use a comma, but the pipe symbol is generally accepted as a keyword delimiter.

Next, the description tag: <meta name=”description” content=”The description of the page is what will most likely show up in the Search Engine results”>

You’ll want to use full, understandable sentences, and try to get your keyphrases into it if you can. The description shouldn’t be more than 100-200 characters long, or it will get cut off and the end won’t be seen by anyone.

Finally, the title tag: <title>Your Keywords | Second Keyword | Like This</title>

The title tag should be much like your Meta keywords tag, but it will be displayed on the browser’s title bar, as well, so make sure you use capital letters, and don’t include any misspellings.

I want to stress, however, that Meta tags are NOT the “instant solution” that many people are looking for in SEO. (They used to be, but the search engines put a stop to that) In fact, there is no single “instant solution” besides paying the search engine to put you on the first page. You have to take many other factors into consideration to get the top spots.

Content Is King

Search engines love content, and the best way to “optimize” your site is to provide valuable, original content at regular intervals. Your visitors will love it, and come back again and again; and the search engines will love to visit your site and find more quality content for them to index.

What you can’t do in your content is an old SEO trick called “keyword stuffing.”

Keyword stuffing used to be a very effective SEO method called keyword stuffing, but keyword stuffing was worthless to your antikeyword stuffing visitors, because the anti-keyword stuffing readers couldn’t read the keyword stuffed content very well, because of the keyword stuffing. This keyword stuffing method quickly became outlawed by the anti-keyword stuffing search engines because keyword stuffing wasn’t valuable to their anti-keyword stuffing searchers who didn’t like keyword stuffing.

You get my point, putting keywords or keyphrases wherever they can possibly fit is pointless, hard to read, and it will get you banned from the search engines. It’s even worse to have keywords listed over and over and over and over on a page, as that provides absolutely no content value to a reader.

Instead, use keywords in your copy where you would normally use them in conversation. This will make for the best readable, informative content for your visitors, and the search engines will spider and index your pages. A few more or less keywords in your content won’t make much of a difference in your ranking.

My rule of thumb is to always read my content before uploading the page to determine if I’d be happy reading it if it wasn’t on my site. That gives me a good indication of whether or not my visitors will enjoy reading it. If I don’t like it, my visitors probably won’t, either.

That Was Time Consuming…

This is a very great way to move up the Google SERPs, no “expertise” required, just good old-fashioned hard work. It will take some time for Google to re-index those pages and realize that they have a link to you now. And it will take even longer for your visible PR to go up. (I’m convinced that Google modifies your “real” PR daily, if necessary, and only updates the “visible” PR on the toolbar every few months) Be patient, get links upon links, keep adding great content to your site, and you will jump up in the SERPS by leaps and bounds.

I’m not going to go into this much deeper, but I will point you toward a great resource for SEO information (I mentioned it earlier, too). Go to Search Engine Optimization Made Easy and you can download a free copy of SEO Genius Brad Callen’s “Search Engine Optimization Made Easy” ebook. He is the mastermind behind the SEO Elite software, which I HIGHLY recommend to anyone who wants to get higher search engine rankings.