At this point, you should have a list of keywords. If you have a very short one, or are having trouble thinking of some, you can gain access to professional software at minimal cost. Just start a Google adwords campaign, or a CPC campaign on Overture. Each of these sites have "keyword suggestion" tools that will give you several keywords based on your product or service, and will include relative popularity of each one.

TIP THREE: PLACE KEYWORDS CAREFULLY

Once you have your keywords, you’ll want to use them in right places. The goal is to help search engines find your site for those phrases, so you will want to place them in spots engines look closely at. These include page Title, inside meta tags, inside heading tag, in domain name (more about this in a later lesson), and keyword tags.

You will also want to sprinkle them liberally throughout content (text) of your site, with special consideration for top of your page and its first paragraphs. This is especially important on your home (index page), which is one that most search engines will cache when spidering through. And please, have some real content on your page, and not just a list of keywords, or your site could go down in its rankings. Search engines do rank according to content relevancy, and site that says "Our dealership provides quality used Chevrolet cars, reconditioned to meet our customer’s needs," (with at least 100 words of good, relevant content) will always rank higher than site that says, "cars, cars, cars, buy quality used Chevrolet cars, quality used cars are here". In addition, you won’t drive away customers offended by poor quality writing and obvious over-usage of marketing phrases.

But you do want to maintain a certain ratio of keyword density in your text; a keyword density of 5 to 7% is usually recommended. If you don’t feel comfortable writing copy using keywords, a professional copywriter who specializes in online writing can help you.

THREE COMMON MISTAKES TO AVOID

Mistake #1: One common error that many people make is to forget to place ALT tags for their graphics. You may have a beautiful logo or graphic on your web site, but if you don’t have an alt tag, search engines can’t "read it". Be sure to place keywords there, and to label graphics with names that reflect keywords.

Mistake #2: Always have text on your site. When creating your site, search engines depend upon text to decide what your site is about. The more relevant text, better. The spiders and bots can’t "read" graphics as mentioned above. Don’t just make text for site one big graphic, as some firms do. The search engines will skip over graphic, and assume you have no content at all.

Mistake #3: Finally, please don’t spam (by trying to ‘hide’ your keywords by using a font same color as background, or repeating keyword phrases over and over in title and meta tags). Search engines are now excellent at finding those who try to break rules (and their technology for doing so is getting more sophisticated all time), and will drop spammers from their indexes like a hot potato. So play by rules, and when in doubt, ask an ethical SEO firm for advice, or visit one of many excellent forums online (such as Jill Whalen’s High Rankings Search Engine Forums).

Your site will rise more quickly, and enjoy higher rankings, if you follow these tips and their advice. And your traffic will increase, at no cost to you!

3. RSS Feeds Result in More Frequent Spidering

One thing I never anticipated would happen as a result of adding an RSS feed to my site was that Googlebot visited my site almost daily. To Googlebot, my page that had RSS feed incorporated into it was as good as a page that was being updated daily, and in its judgement, was a page that was worth visiting daily.

What this means to you, is that you will have your site being indexed more frequently by Googlebot and so any new pages that you add to your site will be picked up much faster than your competitors.

How does this benefit you as a marketer?

Well, for example, let's says a top Internet Marketer comes out with a new product that you review and write up a little article on, and that your competitors do same.

Google generally tends to index pages at start of month and if you miss that update, you will probably need to wait till next month to even see your entry in.

But, since your site has RSS feeds, it now gets indexed more frequently. So chances of getting your page indexed quickly are much higher.

This gives you an advantage over competition, as your review will show up sooner in search results than theirs.

Imagine what an entire month's advantage could do to your affiliate sales!

Why Javascript Feeds Are Not Effective

Some sites offer javascript code that generates content sourced from RSS feeds for your site.

These are of absolutely no value in terms of search engine rankings, as googlebot cannot read javascript and content is not interpreted as part of your page.

What you need is code that parses RSS feed and renders feed as html content that's part of your page.

This is achieved using server side scripting languages like PHP or ASP.

A good free ASP script is available from Kattanweb http://www.kattanweb.com/webdev/projects/index.asp?ID=7

An equally good PHP script is CARP http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/

So in conclusion, besides optimizing on page and off page factors, adding RSS feeds to your pages should be an important part of your strategy to boost your search engine rankings.