By Justin Horth First published 13 Oct 2003 ------------------------------------------------------------ Hi,

Doesn't time fly when you're having fun?!

I'll let you in a little secret, time stands still for no man!! Especially when he's got an ezine to publish, websites to build, is moving to US in 4 weeks time, and doesn't exercise enough!!

Enough already.

How about optimising your website for a search engine? Do you know enough about that?

The best advice I've ever read came from Sumantra Roy. He publishes a nice 5 part email course that is really worth reading. The first time I read it, I couldn't wait for next part to arrive in my inbox.

http://www.acewebhits.com/1stsearch.htm

The basic idea is to make sure you optimise each page for a specific keyword phrase that is likely to be typed into a search engine, but to make sure it's not a phrase that is too popular and not give your site a chance at getting listed.

Then you will put that phrase in you html title tags and in h1 tag and then again mention phrase as much as contextually possible throughout page.

You can also think about naming page as yourphrase.html and even create it in a directory of your website called yourphrase.

Here's an example: I recently joined a program called morehitsmoreincome, and decided to quickly put together a mini-sales page for it.

All I did to get text was basically copy and paste a bit of it from main site itself, faqs etc. then I made sure I named it as moreitsmoreincome.html

A guaranteed top ranking in majority of search engines is a simple task and can be accomplished for far less than $1295 to $3000+ that some so called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies ask.

Very shortly you too will know truth and be able to do deal more effectively with your SEO and SEO companies.

Here are two of biggest hypes in SEO.

First is guaranteed 1st position hype...

Many companies tout this as a huge selling point of their SEO service. That's great. Until you read fine print.

The fine print tells you that this guarantee is based on a pay to play basis. For all of us novices and laymen that is pay per click (PPC) advertising.

You pay a large fee to SEO company and then you pay additional money for PPC ads.

PPC is either in form of bidding per click such as on Google AdWords or Overture. Or paid submission to Inktomi, AltaVista, AskJeeves, etc.

Bottom line is that for enough money you can be number one on any keyword.

Yes you can pay $8.00 per click on certain words in your industry, however question is do you want to and is it worth it?

The second touted benefit is keyword research. Most of this research is based on what you tell SEO and use of tools such as WordTracker and Overture's Inventory tool.

The keyword list is mailed or emailed to you for approval.

A huge disadvantage is limited amount of keywords that most SEO's include in their fee (some only allow 20 words.)