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It's not my intention to boast - far from it! But, it came as a pleasant surprise to me recently when I managed to achieve what most people say is impossible: get on page one of Yahoo/Google and Altavista *and* get top position for my keywords, both on my first attempt.
I didn't use any tricks, I have no hidden links - in fact I have almost no links to speak of - I didn't stuff my metatags or ALT parameters with junk, and I didn't generate hundreds of gateway pages.
The most important thing I did was to develop a unique product for a particular niche.
And, I did that only after researching net and making sure that nobody else had same thing. There *are* some similar products, but none with exact same features. Hence, my particular product *is* unique. It took a long time to develop (three years), but it was a laborious task (the product will *never* be finished really, and it is now my task to maintain it).
With product ready, I then designed and coded web pages, building an entire domain around this one complete idea. I didn't want any extraneous issues or offers to detract from domain's raison d'etre; I would use *other* domains to promote my affiliate programs and other products.
The design is simple to point of Spartan; coding is so basic, a beginner could do it easily. Just as well, as my knowledge of CGI scripting, Javascript and like is abysmal. However, I wanted *nothing* to get in way of my message and what I wanted to market.
Before developing code, I wrote out my sales letter in Word, doing layout as I wrote, working out headlines, and getting look and feel of my page way I wanted, before I converted it to HTML.
When sales letter and basic coding was done, I then turned to TITLE, DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS within HTML code.
There has been a lot written about those three and no doubt there will continue to be much said. I don't profess to be expert at all, but I do know this:
(1) The TITLE must be relevant and must make linguistic and logical sense when read by a human. If it contains two or three powerful keywords, so much better. TITLE length, I think, should adhere to that required by Yahoo.
(2) The DESCRIPTION must be relevant also and should contain your most powerful keywords, but should not merely repeat your title. Similarly, its length should not exceed that required by Yahoo. The very first headline of sales letter should be *exactly* same as DESCRIPTION.
(3) The KEYWORDS used must appear in sales letter, but only in a certain ratio to total words on a page. Depending upon who you read, that ratio can vary from 3% to 10% (my home page for this product has about a 4% ratio). Also, from material I've read, opinion is roughly split 50/50 about whether keywords should be in upper or lower case. I've opted to use all upper case, separated by commas with no spaces.
