Liza Lambert

Before you start doing things to rank well in the search engines, you need to determine what your “money words” are. In other words, what keywords do people who buy from you type into the search engines. If you are selling auto insurance, are people typing auto insurance or car insurance? You can determine what your money keywords are by creating and using a Google Adwords account to quickly test keywords for profitability.

Once you know your money words, you need to pick one and start optimizing for it. The first thing you need to realize is that Google and the other major search engines rank individual pages, not entire websites. So you are actually going to want to optimize one or more pages on your site. Please start with just one. Maybe it’s your home page, but it does not have to be.

There are 2 types of optimization for the search engines. Internal (on page) and external (off page).

Internal optimization can be summarized as having:

1) Clean HTML Code on your site

2) A great Title Meta Tag that includes your money word AND inspires people to click on the link when it shows up in the search engines

3) A great Description Meta Tag where the text in that tag also shows up on the page somewhere

4) Links on your page that point to other pages on and off your site. Use relevant text when linking to other pages on your site and other sites. Don’t use the phrase “click here” instead; use text that describes the page you are linking to.

5) A site map page that links to every page on your website and is linked to by every page on your site.

6) Fresh Content which encourages the search engines to come back to your site more often so that you can test new ideas

External optimization is even simpler to summarize (and actually more powerful):

1) Get links from pages on your site and from other high ranking websites

2) Get more links

3) Get more links

The links you get should appear natural and not all use the exact same words to link to your site, but a majority of the links should link to your page on using your money word.

Summary

Search engine optimization is a required technique that all website owners who are serious about high rankings must do to all of their web pages. But Google will blacklist your site if you use certain SEO practices on your pages.