To achieve great rankings for keywords within a competitive product sector, a business must identify and understand the components that affect the major search algorithms. By improving the variables that affect your rankings, your business can create an incremental traffic source at no cost.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN should be three sources of traffic to your business. Without executing an SEO optimization, your organization is missing out on a critical mass of potential customers with interest in your business.

This article outlines seven rules that will positively affect your search optimization efforts. The key is consistency, or rather, a continuous focus on improving the on-page and off-page variables that will drive your success.

Rule #1 Target words that are attainable and precise

Every business wants to be ranked #1 for the best keywords. In most cases however, it is the secondary tier of terms that delivers your best results. This is especially true if you are just starting your SEO and have a limited number of existing inbound links. By initially optimizing for the second tier of keywords, your speed to achieving rankings for targeted keywords increases dramatically.

Assessing your competition before embarking on your SEO project will help you fully understand the probability of SEO success. Look at your competitor page rank and link popularity and benchmark versus your levels.

Rule #2 - Understand the concept of keyword density and make sure your terms are in the right percentage range

Keyword density is the percentage of total words within the body of a page with the keyword that you are targeting. For example, a fishing products retailer trying to optimize your homepage for the terms "fishing supplies", the term "fishing supplies" should represent between 5-10% of the total text on the page.

Go over 10% through un-natural writing, and your page may be flagged as spam. Go less than 5%, and your density may not be high enough. 5-10% has proven to be the "sweet spot" in today's search algorithms regarding keyword density.

Rule #3 - Leverage "viral" marketing for your link building

Because of "link farms", the major engines have reconstructed their algorithms to place a higher value on one way links versus reciprocal links. Outside of buying these links, which is considered “black hat tactics” by Google engineers, the most effective way to grow link numbers is to syndicate original content via the internet to other content-hungry webmasters.

By crafting original articles that include your business URL, and manually submitting these articles to content networks/article directories on the internet, you have a natural "one way" credit link for the content when these articles are shown live by other sites. These one way links make you more of an authority within the engines and hence drive up your natural rankings.

Rule #4 - 2-3 primary keywords per page, no more, no less

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