I always tell my clients that there are no secret methods of SEO, and that they could really save money by doing some homework on the issue of Search Engine Optimization. That being said, it does take major time and effort to effectively get your site to be optimized for search engines such as google, yahoo, and msn.
Getting Started: Relevant Content, Page Titles, Meta Data
Search engines send out "spiders" to crawl your site to see if it contains relevant information, and you cannot pay search engines to ranked high in the natural results. In order to be sure you are at the top is by employing paid ads and paying the highest price per click. I do my best to suggest a blog for every client so that an avenue of relevant content is at their fingertips. Within your content you will want to produce keywords and key phrases that repeat throughout the page, but not sacrifice the readability of the conent.
Keywords are less effective than keyword phrases because the average google user understands that they need to be specific in their search terms if they want to get the information they need quick. For instance if you were to sell clothing online, I would suggest that you not even waste time trying to make "clothing" your top keyword. Considering the international big-wigs like gap and old navy top the charts for "clothing", it may be wise to seek out a phrase like "kids leather jackets"
You want to be sure the title of your page (the title you see on the top of your browser) is named exactly like your top keyword phrase. This can be especially difficult with online stores as some of the open source and lower cost shopping carts offer very little SEO integration in terms of page naming and keywords.
It is a good practice to have a description that entails your top keyword phrase and summarizes the content it is describing clearly. Often I have seen where your average website has a title that may be cut, but lacks relevancy to the search engines, has a description that is populated with keyword phrases that are not in the content, and keywords that are not impactful. Without doing your homework some may think that stuffing your web page with every keyword you an think of in the title, content, description, and keywords amy be effective, but this is simply false.
