It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. Therefore you should invest some energy into finding the best keywords. There are several SEO tools available on the Internet to help you find the best keywords. Tip: Don't be deceived by organizations that require you to register first. The two most popular resources are WordTracker and Yahoo!. Because Yahoo! has a man-made database that truncates plurals, I prefer to use WordTracker (WT).
SEO Tip #2: Discover Your Competitors:
It's a fact and one of my top 10 SEO tips, that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.
My tool of choice is SEO Elite, which digs through the major search engines by keyword to not only tell you who your competitors are, but also provides you with an in-depth analysis of each competitor. The analysis includes these extremely important linking criteria (super SEO tips), such as:
* Competitor rank in the Search Engines
* Number of incoming links
* What keywords are in the title of linking page
* % of links containing keywords in the link text
* The PageRank of linking pages
* The Alexa traffic ranking information
SEO Tip #3: Optimize Your Title:
The Title and META tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for most search engines to store and list them in the search results. Us SEO Expert's have experimented with these two pieces of code to help us reach an accepted conclusion about how best to use them. Don't click off this site until you've read the top 10 SEO tips below to see what I've discovered works best for search engine optimization.
Optimizing Your Website Title
There are different theories about how long your Title should be. Since Google only displays the first 66 or so characters (with spaces), my Top 10 SEO Tips for the title would be to keep it under 66 characters and relevant to the content on the page. However, some may argue that the value of the homepage title may warrant additional search term inclusion.
Bar none the most important of the top 10 SEO tips involves your keywords. If you wish to be on the first page of the search results, you must include your keywords in your Title tag. Preferably before all other words in the Title. No need to repeat your keywords in the Title, that's interpreted as spam by the search engines. Here is an example of good Title:
SEO Tips: Search Engine Ranking
Notice the | symbol between the keyword phrases. These are the types of SEO tips your competitors don't want you to know about. For whatever reason, this little symbol has helped top SEO's (including myself) target more than one keyword per page. I still recommend starting with one keyword phrase per page, but if you're aggressive and think you can compete against a website targeting just one, by all means go for it.
SEO Tip #4: Optimize Your META Tags:
META tags are hidden code read only by search engine webcrawlers (also called spiders). They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 4 very important META tags you need to worry about. Meta tags specifying who the author is and what the site is about really isn't important to the search engines that matter the most (i.e.: Google). The META tags you need to be the most concerned about are:
1. robots
2. content-type
3. description
4. keywords
