4.What's title of your page? I don't know how many times I see titles such as "Article" or "Contact us". Don't expect search engine robots to get all excited about that term. And don't expect anybody to search for that term, either. Much better to title your page "Free article on safe toys for babies" or "Contact *Baby Toy Expert* today". By way, this is single most important place to include your keyword phrases.

5.What about that navigation menu that appears on every single page of your website? Does it say "Contact baby toy expert?" Or "about baby toy expert". Or links about baby toys?" Need I say more?

If your website is about life insurance, you have little hope of hitting front pages of any search engine. "Life insurance" is such a competitive search engine marketplace. Unless, of course, people are searching for a very specific and rare niche. Even then, I suspect you will need much more than these five tips.

In fact, there are dozens, if not hundreds of things you can do to win search engine race. These top five search engine optimization tips are a great start, whatever your website is about.

The choosing of keywords to target is probably most crucial step of entire search engine optimization process. This will determine success and/or failure of your promotions. Even if you attain all top placements that were targeted, if you target wrong terms these rankings will produce little or no results. So how do you determine for yourself which keywords to target?

Without getting into anything too technical there are a couple of great resources out there to help you isolate keywords that you should target.

The Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool Advantages – The Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool is free and produces a large number of results for related searches. Disadvantages – There are two main disadvantages to Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool in determining your keywords. The first of these is that it puts everything in terms on singular and further will correct misspellings where you may want to know how many people searched for a misspelled term. If you run a shopping site that sells gifts you will not be able to determine whether main searched phrase was “gift” or “gifts”. The second major disadvantage to Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool is that it doesn’t give you alternative search phrases that are related but that you might not have thought to punch in (“presents” for example). Which brings us to second tool.

WordTracker Advantages – WordTracker addresses all disadvantages noted about Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool. It differentiates between singular and plural and will allow you to search for misspellings. Further, it searches a thesaurus and will make a number of suggestions for other terms you may not have thought of but which may be related to your industry. It will then analyze variety of terms that you have searched and chosen and actually make recommendations on which keywords to target based on number of competing pages and specific search engine you are targeting. It will also give you a predicted number of searches per day for each phrase. Disadvantages – The only real disadvantage to WordTracker is that it has a cost. There is a free trial on site which you can use though results it produces are far lower in numbers and it does not give you information on all of major search engines. Certainly worth checking into even if you only try demo mode (not a download – this is an online resource).

So you now have a list of possible keyword phrases … now what? The next step is to determine whether you can compete with those currently holding top positions and, more importantly, whether it will be economical to do so. The first place to look when you are trying to determine this is search engines themselves. Let’s assume for a second that you have determined that there are a good number of searches for your product and that main keyword phrase you would like to target is “acne cures”. The next step is to run a search for “acne cures”. Most people are interested primarily in their Google rankings and so you would run that search on Google producing following results: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=acne+cures.

The site currently holding #4 position is www.approvedcures.com. Take a look at site. There are two major things that you will first be looking for:

Is this a large site with a lot of content related to search phrase? In this case answer is “yes”. They have a very large site and all of it is related to topic search was for.

How many incoming links do they have? You will now want to find out what sort of link popularity you will be competing with. Links are not end-all-be-all of search engine optimization, if fact it is just one of a large number of deciding factors, however links help determine your Google PageRank and this PageRank is a final multiplier in determining your position. Because number of incoming links is easily determined it is something you should look into. To determine number of links simply enter into Google search bar “link:www.domain-in-question.com”. In this case it would be http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=link%3Awww.approvedcures.com . They do not have a large number of incoming links and thus, this is not going to be a significant factor in determining their ranking.

And Now You’re Ready For Search Engine Placement At this point you should have a pretty good idea as to whether search engine placement is a viable choice for your website promotions, which keywords you should target, and what competition you will be facing.

Assuming that your website needs to be optimized, you will now be faced with choice of doing it yourself or hiring a search engine placement firm.

If you will be doing your own optimization I would highly recommend reading an article by CEO of StepForth Search Engine Placement entitled “A 10 Minute Search Engine Optimization”. It can be found on StepForth website at http://news.stepforth.com/2003-news en-minute-optimization.shtml.

If you will be hiring on a search engine placement firm I would recommend first submitting your site for a free website review off of our homepage at http://www.stepforth.com. There is no obligation and it will give you a very good idea of what areas need to be addressed.