The problem here is that most people think search engine optimization is like magic and that only search engine "gurus" have all answers.

Forunately, for you, this is far from true. In fact search engine optimization is relatively easy. What stops most people from ranking well in search engines is misinformation and promise of quick fixes. Every week there's a new tool or ebook that promises to solve all your search engine woes. There are no quick fixes folks. Accept that as a truth and move forward.

What follows in next three articles is a 10 step program for improving your online presence and search engine rankings. Enjoy!

Keywords

Keywords should be first step in your search engine optimization campaign. People put keywords or phrases into search engines looking for information. The search engines then check their index for pages that contain these keywords. Unless your pages contain keywords relevant to your business or service then do not expect search engines to rank you well. It's that simple.

For example if you have a website about dating then you'll find it very difficult to rank well for keyword "dating" because so many other sites are competing for it. However if you were to target a specific area like gay and lesbian dating then you're dealing with a smaller, more targetted market. You could even regionalize it by targetting gay and lesbian dating in Toronto. See where we're going with this?

So what keywords tools are available to you? Describing each of them goes beyond scope of this article so please refer to our site for more information on this topic.

Content

Make this your motto - Provide Useful Content. DO NOT provide keyword stuffed, spammy, automatically generated pages. Write something useful for your visitors based on keywords which are relevant to your business or service.

Page Title
It's truly amazing how many people don't realize how critical TITLE tag can be to success or failure of your website. Your TITLE tag needs to have your most important keyword for that page included in it. This is for benefit of search engines.

From a visitors point of view it also needs to entice them to click on your title tag when they see it in search engine results. If your page is about PDA Accessories don't just use that phrase in TITLE tag.

Dress it up a bit. For example "PDA Accessories For The Busy Geek" or "Need Accessories for Your PDA? Come right in!" Those examples took me 10 seconds to come up with. You can do far better with a little more time and effort.

META Keyword Tag
Anybody still using Meta Keyword tag as their sole search engine optimization method please leave room. Go on get out and don't come back.

The Meta Keyword tag is all but dead to search engines. When building your pages it's still worth including but simply put in top 3 or 4 keywords that are relevant to your business and leave it at that. Do not spend hours coming up with hundreds of keywords to stuff into Meta Keyword tag. It's a total waste of time and anybody who tells you different has no idea what they're talking about.

META Description Tag
This still has some limited value for your SEO work. When Google or other search engines display search results they display contents of TITLE tag and your Meta Description tag (if present) or a random selection of text from page. Your Meta Description tag will take priority if present.