Title and Title Tag: Choose a title for the page that contains the keyword phrase and is no longer than seven words total if possible. The title should be set to a header font (H1, H2, or H3) so that it appears large and bold on the page.

The title tag is the part of your HTML code that is between the header tags and looks like this:

<title>You title tag text goes here</title>

You can make this text the same as your visible title but I like to rewrite it a little and repeat the keyword phrase a second time. Here is an example: If my keyword phrase was red summer onions my page title might be: Ten Uses for Red Summer Onions and my title tag might be: <title>Red Summer Onions – Ten Great Uses for Red Summer Onions</title>

If your site is a WordPress blog you can use a great free plug-in to easily take care of the title tag and many other SEO factors – All in One SEO Pack.

Keyword Density and Location: The search engines determine what you web page is about by analyzing the words and phrases on the page. A big part of that analysis for a particular keyword is how many times a keyword phrase appears and where it appears.

When you are writing (or re-writing) your content try to include your primary keyword phrase in the first paragraph, in the last paragraph, and enough times in between to amount to about three percent of the text. Do not over do it and stuff your article with keywords – that will not only make the article boring for readers it will also throw up flags to the search engines that you are trying to cheat the system.

There is a great free tool you will want to get that makes it very easy to measure the keyword density of your pages. It does a whole lot more, but it is worth getting just for quickly determining your keyword density. SeoQuake is a free browser plug-in with versions for both Internet Explorer and FireFox.

Golden Take-Away: Print this page and post it in your workspace There are more things you can do to optimize your pages but if you do just these you are 90% there and that is good enough until you learn more from my free newsletter course.

The keywords you target will have a big impact on the search engine rankings you obtain and the traffic you get. Your keywords must be relevant to the content of your pages. If you have a page on your site about green widgets you don’t want to try to optimize that page for the term red widgets.

There are two important aspects of keyword research you need to consider. Once you have in your mind the kind of keywords that are relevant to your page, you need to consider how many people search for the keywords and how much competition there is for the keywords.

It is useless to optimize for keywords that no one searches for. You need a way to get an idea of how many searches per month are done for your selected keyword phrase. Fortunately, there is a great free tool from Google AdWords that you can use. You can even enter the URL of the page you want to target and the tool will suggest keywords.

The other side of the keyword selection coin will determine how hard it will be to rank for your chosen keyword phrase. You can get and estimate of how many Web sites are competing for the same keywords.

The easiest free way to gauge competition is to do a search on Google for your phrase and place quotes around it to specify the exact phrase. If there are hundreds of thousands of pages found you will want to choose a less competitive keyword phrase. If there are 10,000 or less results you will probably be able to rank for it.

There is actually a more accurate way to gauge competition. I’ll save that for the newsletter lessons and a future blog post. I’m keeping this to simpler, but still very effective methods.

Golden Take-Away: Keywords are very important. You should spend time learning to do good keyword research. I will be teaching the details of doing fast but thorough keyword research in the newsletter. For now the information above will get you a good start.

If you want a real powerhouse site for search engine ranking then choose a primary keyword phrase that has a high search volume but reasonable competition. Then use the Google Keyword Tool to find a couple dozen related keywords and start building your site targeting one of those keywords for each page.

Try to get a domain name that contains your main keyword phrase. This will help greatly in your SEO efforts.

There are two distinct functions in search engine optimization. The first function is often called on-page optimization and it is something you have complete control of because it is your website. It is important to take full advantage of that fact to boost your search engine rankings. I’ll tell you how to do this shortly.

The second function is sometimes called off-page optimization, but more often it is just called link building. You will have varying amounts of control of this aspect of SEO from none at all to sometimes having full control. I’ll be telling you how you can control many of the links to your site and why you should.

These two parts of SEO are essential to getting good search engine rankings. If you just optimize your website but get no links to it you will not rank well in the search engines. If you have a poorly optimized site but have a lot of the right kind of links you may get some decent rankings, but not nearly as high as you would with both factors working together.

Search engine ranking is very much a popularity contest. The search engines base the biggest part of their ranking logic on how many sites link to your site and especially, how many high ranking sites link to it. The assumption is that if good sites are linking to your site they must consider your site to be a high quality useful site. This all fits well with the desire of the search engines to provide useful and relevant search results.

Golden Take-Away: You should optimize your site before you start link building. You will be learning some very easy and effective things you can do to make your site search engine friendly. Once you have optimized your site you must start getting the right kind of links to it to get good rankings. I’ll be telling you what the right kinds of links are and how you can get them.