How to Rank High In Google - A Three Step SEO Strategy

What is it that your site has to offer and what will people that want what you have to offer likely be searching for in the search engines? As you think about this begin to make a list of possible phrases that your potential visitors will be searching for. Be as specific and targeted as possible. If you sell philosophy books on your site then a possible phrase could be "Medieval philosophy books". Don't write just "Philosophy" as that would be too general.

After you have made your list of possible keyword phrases narrow down the list to the phrases that you really want to target. Use keyword research tools such as the keyword selector tool, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery to find the keyword phrases that will be most worth your time to go after.

Many people trying to rank high in the search engines make the mistake of trying to optimize for too many keywords on any one page. It is a better strategy to just stick with optimizing for one keyword phrase per page. By focusing on one phrase you are more likely to rank high for that particular phrase and you may get lucky and rank high for other related keyword phrases at the same time. If you want to rank high for more than just one phrase then just create an additional page for each phrase you would like to rank high for.

You have already made a list of keyword phrases so now all you have to do is create a page for each of those phrases. Each page should provide information about the keyword phrase that it is being optimized for. In order to fully optimize each page your keyword phrase should be included in the title, heading, and naturally within the text of the page. If possible the file name of your page should also be your keyword phrase. If your keyword phrase were "medieval philosophy books" an appropriate file name for that page would be medieval-philosophy-books.html.

The third and most important step in ranking high in the search engines is to obtain links from outside sites. The more links the better, but you should focus your efforts on sites that themselves have many links pointing to them, because the search engines place higher value on links from those sites. The amount of links that a site has pointing to it is called link popularity. Google uses a ranking system called PageRank to measure the link popularity of each page. Do a search for "Pagerank tool" or download the google toolbar to find out the pagerank of specific pages. Don't rely to heavily on PageRank to determine a pages worth, though. It is more important to obtain links form sites that are relevant to yours than. For some ideas on how to get links please visit Andy Hagan and Aaron Wall's 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006 article.

Chris Sandberg is a Utah seo, internet marketer, and internet entrepreneur.