Tip #1:
Research and Identify Your Keywords

People are searching for your site with terms you may know, as well as some you may not. Make sure your website is optimized for exactly what people are using to find your website.

• Discover how your prospects are searching for you – use Google’s free keyword tool (adwords.google.com) to find out what terms people use to find sites like yours.
• Narrow down the list – take all the keyword terms you found in your research and make a list of the most searched terms. These are your main keywords to use throughout your website.

Tip #2:
Work Your Keywords into Your Content

To get your website (and pages) ranking high in search engine results, you must create content that is easy to read, informative and includes key words and phrases.

• Say it simply – you don’t need to have every keyword written into every sentence. Write your content as if you were talking to a prospective customer.

Tip #3:
Add Keywords to Your Tags Too

While the value of meta tags has decreased over the years due to abuse and the evolution of search engine algorithms, it is still recommended to integrate keywords into your meta tags.

• Meta keywords tag – this tag tells the search engine what your website is about based on your keywords.
• Meta description tag – the short description you see in search results (also indexed by spiders) should include a short description of your website that includes your keywords.

Tip #4:
Simplify Your Website Layout

Help the search engines help you by creating a website that is easy to crawl and navigate for both the search engine’s bots and your prospects.

• Keep your website easy to explore – use simple navigation that doesn’t require more than 3 clicks to a call to an action (such as clicking a ‘buy’ button or filling out a ‘contact us’ form).
• Cross promote your other pages – include links to your other service and product pages within your content.

Tip #5:
Know What Not to Do

It may be tempting to try to pull one over on the search engines to influence the results, but these methods do not work and will only reduce your ranking, or worse, have your website banned from the results altogether.

• Never buy bulk inbound links – there are seedy services out there that purchase links for you that link from other websites (from the hundreds to the thousands) to your website, which will reduce your rank quickly.
• Don’t repeat keywords incessantly – using the same keywords over and over again in a single tag or sentence is known as ‘keyword stuffing’ and will not only confuse your prospects, it will signal to search engines that you have nothing relevant to say.
• Never hide keywords – the search engines are now smart enough to recognize hidden keywords on your pages and will ban your website for such a practice (such as adding paragraphs of white text on a white background to your pages).
• Refrain from excessive linking – while it’s good to link to other pages and websites, don’t over link (think more than 100 links on a single page). Search engines see that as spam and will penalize you for it.