Most people do not think of SEO as a game. Let me take 5 minutes of your time and explain how SEO is simply a game of Chess.

I remember as a teenager learning how to play Chess for first time. Man it was complicated. Each piece moved different ways. You couldn't take shortcuts and get game over with. You had to really think about your moves and watch your opponents moves as well. With each move they made, you had to analyze your next move and even best plans of attack had to be readjusted constantly. The game was always changing depending on who you played against. But once you understood game, once you understood all components of game, you were hooked.

The same goes for SEO.

The First Step to playing SEO Game is understanding game.

Read rules of game. Understand what is allowed, what is not allowed, and things you must avoid. Research how people will find you. Know what your keyword/keyword phrases are. Who will be coming into your website? Who will you be marketing to?

Google Rules and Guidelines can be found at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Yahoo Guidelines can be found at http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-05.html

MSN Guidelines can be found at http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm

Setting Up Your Chessboard (or website)

Set up your website correctly from start. Make sure all pieces of your website are were they belong. For instance, place your Title tags and Meta tags into your headtags. Create clean style web pages from start. Move your javascripting and css off page and into their own file so that search engines can get to what is important right away.

Playing The Game

In Chess, rook and bishop do not move same way on your chessboard. Understand how each piece of game moves and works and use them to help you win game.

The same is true for your SEO. For example, many people do not use their head tags correctly. They try to stuff as many keywords as they can think of into Meta Keywords tag. This will not get you far in game. Try to be focused in your keywords. Use 3-5 keyword/keyword phrases at most and never use same word more then 3 times.

Make sure you are using all pieces of game. Title tags, Meta Tags, H1 Tags, Content, Links, Relevancy, etc. Some people think when playing chess that pawns are really of no use. You can lose them, you can keep them, no big deal. The same can be said about Meta Tags. However when playing against Yahoo or MSN, they will take advantage of your pawns. More so then when playing with Google. But why would you not use these pieces in a game? Why would you not take advantage of every single piece and make each one as important as others. Would you have a better chance of winning if you used each piece of game instead of only a few?

If you optimise your pages by working through these points one by one you will see a significant rise in your search engine rankings.

1: Buy right Domain names! The best way to increase your rankings in SE's(Search Engines) and for least amount of effort is to choose right domain name for your site from start. The SE's give a domain name highest prominence and score when issuing a ranking. So it's a major priority to have your domain name contain keywords relevant to your site content.

The other point to remember is that domain names can have up to 67 characters in them including extension(.com, .net etc) now as opposed to original 23. So you can load your domain name with a number of keywords to boost your ranking, just remember to use a hyphen to separate them out.

This also means that if a really great domain name has gone you can get something close and in fact better because you could simply add another keyword. Eg say exercise-equipment.com wasn't available, I could register best-exercise equipment.com or cheap-exercise-equipment.com.

I have a number of clients using this technique very successfully, and of course if you check out address bar above this very site does same thing. ;-)

For cheapest domain names online with best control panel online try www.123-reg.co.uk I highly recommend these guys I've used them for years now and register all my own and my clients domains through them.

2: Choose right Title for your page. The title of your page is what visitors will see across top of their browsers when they visit your site. It's important that each of your site pages is titled differently to distinguish them from each other and to tie in with content of page.

This is also title of your listing when your site is returned in results of a Search Engine.

This is probably second most important thing to get right after choosing your domain name. If your domain name has good keywords then repeat these keywords in title of your page, add a hyphen and then add your keyword rich title for that page. So going back to example above exercise-equipment.com your title should probably be along lines of -

Best Exercise Equipment - Best, Cheap, New and Used Exercise Equipment.

Notice how I get exercise equipment in there twice, first as name of site and then as a description of page. The capitalising of main words within title will help your page stand out in results a little. Don't be tempted capitalise all your letters this looks cheap and some directory's will not list your page with a title in this state.

I've mentioned keywords a fare bit already and I should probably say jump down to No5 for a better idea of what they are and how to use them.

3: Use H1 tag on the, on page, title/heading of your page. A H1 tag is heading text tag in HTML. SE's give this tag more relevancy as it's generally used for title of a page eg h1 best exercise equipment /h1.

That 's actual on page title and not browser title.

If you try this out you'll find that it looks pretty ugly, with lots of space around it and much to chunky for a nice looking site.

So here's a trick you can use to keep H1 tag but have text appear as normal. *whisper use css style sheets to shrink text back to size. Check title of this page 'Web site optimisation Part1' that's a H1 tag that's been fixed. Big difference isn't there.

This is a little known but very useful secret. ;-)

Here's code to do trick, drop it into your css document or place it 'style' tags at head of your code -

h1 {font-size: 13px; margin: 0px;}

Its that simple, play around with font-size until it's in proportion to rest of your page. Remember it's title of your page and should stand out a little from rest of text.

4: Meta tags are still useful. Choosing keywords. Not as important as they once were due to abuse. But still used by a number of well known search engines, new Yahoo search checks them as does MSN search. But Google gives them little relevance. Which means it's still important to use them to cover all your bases.