1. Choosing the Right Keywords

The most important and basic requirement is to optimize your site to a group of keywords. It’s very important not to keep the keywords generic. The keywords should be specific and targeted towards your niche.

eg: a web design website in Canada could target the keyword “web design”. This keyword has a huge competition and the chances of a new site to get a good ranking for this keyword is slim to none. It would be better to target the keyword “web design canada” or get more local and optimize for the city, like “web design toronto”, “web design vancouver” etc.

It important to see the competition you have for the keyword you are targeting and appropriate choose them. Type in the keyword in Google, Yahoo or MSN and see the number of sites that show up in the results. Larger the number greater the competiion. You will notice that the competition for longer tailed keywords is lesser.

You can use the also use a tool like the Google Keyword Tool for detailed traffic numbers for each keywords and get ideas for other possible keywords in your niche.

As a rough guideline, try to optimize every page on your site for a different search phrase. Each search phrase should contain 2 to 3 highly targeted keywords.

2. Your URL and Title Tag

It would be ideal to own the www.webdesign.com domain for a web design company or webdesigncanada.comfor a web design company in canada but typically all the domain names you are looking for are not available.

One way around this is to get a domain that could be web-design.com or web-design-canada.com etc. This might not be appealing to many because it doesnt sound professional as you might want the url to be www.yourcompany.com.

The most common way to make your domain/URL work for you is to include the keywords in the file name of each page. eg: www.yourcompany.com/web-design-canada.html, www.yourcompany.com/cheap-web-design-package.html etc.

It’s also important to include the keywords in your title tag. You cant stuff the title tag with keywords because it would look unprofessional. Incorporate the keywords into your message cleverly.

Remember to have different title tags for every page as you will be targeting different keywords in each page.

3. H1 tags and Keyword Density

The H1 tag no longer power that it used too. What exists is the fact that most search engines like Google, values the content between the H1 more than any other tag. You need to have keyword and keyword phrases in H1 tags at a few places in each page.

Yes, H1 tags arent pretty so you would need to use CSS to stylize them.

eg: H1 { color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px }

4. Alt and Title tags

Many developers and designers forget about these tags. Its important to put keywords in the image alt tags and href title tags. Once again avoid keyword stuffing as these keywords would be visible to the view when they mouseover the image or the link. Include the keywords in professional phrases.

eg: <img src=”images/logo.gif” alt=”cheap web design in toronto, canada”>

<a href=”web-design-rates.html” title=”web design rates in toronto”>

5. Keyword Density

The percentage of your keywords in the content of your page is the keyword density of that page. You can increase the keyword density by incorporating keywords in the various tags mentioned in the previous points.

Also, you can make sure to rephrase a few sentences in your page to highlight the keywords.

Remember, not to stuff your page with keywords. Keep the keyword density between 1 to 4 percent anything higher could be considered as spam by most search engines.

You can use the tool at Keyword Density or other such tools.

Of course, this is not the end. Link Building would be the next most important technique but Google and other search engines have come down heavily on link farms and other unrelated link exchanges. Its good to get a few direct link exchanges with sites in your niche but avoid inbound links from unrelated sites.

The easiest way to get link backs to your site is to start a blog on your site and use our social meida and bookmarking sites.

Hopefully, this gives some of the readers