Search engine optimization has changed a lot over the years. What worked a few short years ago can get your site banned from Google today.

Actually, let me rephrase that... Search engine optimization tricks have changed a lot over the years. But in truth, good solid SEO practices have remained stable and work better today than in years past. Why better? Because so many others keep trying to win with tricks that Google hates. This leaves you to reap the rewards of methods that Google loves!

The most important thing to realize is that Google, and other popular search engines place 90% and MORE of their ranking preferences on content and links. Keywords are still important, but only in the content of your pages; not in META tags like the old days.

It's that simple. And just as simple is how to accomplish that top ranking...

1.) First you need to find the best keywords and place them just right in your page's content.

2.) Next you need to find, get and manage great inbound links.

3.) Last, you need to closely monitor your progress (and your competition!)

Goal 1: Find the Best Keywords

Let's use Google's own keyword database to see what search terms are best to target. Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and enter any keyword or keyword phrase you think your future customers are looking for. Now get ready for a LOT of great results!

INSIDER TIP; Use specific and "long tail" keyword phrases whenever possible. One of my client's is in national floral delivery. Here's a real example of how my business partner and I put that business at number on Google with the perfect keywords...

The client had been paying per click for the term "flowers" and barely breaking even after spending tens of thousands of dollars per month in PPC costs. We not only gave him much better targetd keywords for his pay per click campaign, at one tenth the cost, but also made jim number one for his new primary keyword using the methods described later in this article. Before we go too deep however, let's look at the new keywords and the logic used to get there...

Instead of just the word "flowers", which has 233,000,000 competing pages on Google, we looked at what he really wanted to attract visits for. Although there are lots of possibilities, we will stick with just one example that saves him about $35,000 per month in PPC expenses and gives him another $100,000 per month in profit. We first evaluated "send flowers", which has 1/10th the number of competing pages. Then we asked him to try "think like people speak" (I.E./ I'm "sending flowers" to my mom.) As it turns out, a lot more people are searching for "sending flowers" than are searching "send flowers" and "sending flowers" has less than 1% of the competing web pages as the search term he started with, "flowers". Now that's impressive!

Use this method of keyword determination (get exact and use longer keyord phrases when appropriate) and you have will have an instant advantage over about 99% of your competitors.

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