Before you start doing things to rank well in the search engines, you need to determine what your “money words” are. In other words, what keywords do people who buy from you type into the search engines. If you are selling auto insurance, are people typing auto insurance or car insurance? You can determine what your money keywords are by creating and using a Google Adwords account to quickly test keywords for profitability.

Once you know your money words, you need to pick one and start optimizing for it. The first thing you need to realize is that Google and the other major search engines rank individual pages, not entire websites. So you are actually going to want to optimize one or more pages on your site. Please start with just one. Maybe it’s your home page, but it does not have to be.

There are 2 types of optimization for the search engines. Internal (on page) and external (off page).

Internal optimization can be summarized as having:

1) Clean HTML Code on your site

2) A great Title Meta Tag that includes your money word AND inspires people to click on the link when it shows up in the search engines

3) A great Description Meta Tag where the text in that tag also shows up on the page somewhere

4) Links on your page that point to other pages on and off your site. Use relevant text when linking to other pages on your site and other sites. Don’t use the phrase “click here” instead; use text that describes the page you are linking to.

5) A site map page that links to every page on your website and is linked to by every page on your site.

6) Fresh Content which encourages the search engines to come back to your site more often so that you can test new ideas

External optimization is even simpler to summarize (and actually more powerful):

1) Get links from pages on your site and from other high ranking websites

2) Get more links

3) Get more links

The links you get should appear natural and not all use the exact same words to link to your site, but a majority of the links should link to your page on using your money word.

You can ask websites for a free link, you can buy links, or you can trade links. If you buy or trade, be careful because the search engines don’t like this and you might need to do it in a way that they can’t trace. For instance, linking to someone’s site and having them link back to you used to work well, but now you have to be more clever by linking to a site that doesn’t link back to you, but instead a different site links to you (called a 3-way link).

To prove how valuable links are, go to a major search engine and search for the phrase: “click here”. Notice that Adobe’s Acrobat Reader download link shows up near the top. If you go to their page, you will not see the phrase “click here” anywhere. But so many people have linked to their site on that phrase, that they rank really high for it.

There is a lot more to search engine optimization, but the information in this article should get you well on your way to ranking high in the search engines.