Unless you live under a rock you are keenly aware that nearly every purchase for a product or service begins with a search on the internet. When people search for products or services it’s the websites that rank on the first page that will get all of the business - period. Anything outside of 1st or 2nd pages rankings won’t do you much good. There are tons of amazing free tools available to everyone including one that tells you how many people locally are actually searching for your products/services each and every month.

Search Engine Optimization can be a very scary subject to most people. You can remove that fear if you understand how to move your website to the first page of the search engines and get found when prospects search for products or services online. To get top rankings you don’t need to be internet savvy you just need to some basic knowledge.

In today’s world you can’t ignore the need for an internet presence and you better be prepared sooner than later because the time is coming where you wont be able to survive without an internet presence.

"Internal Optimization" will dramatically increase your rankings but after you learn the secrets of link building, which is a part of "external optimization you will learn how to dominate the web and capture massive internet traffic and grow your business to new levels.

There are two kinds of optimization, Internal and External.

Internal Optimization: This is where it all begins. Internal optimization is the optimization that is done on your website. These items include the content that you write on your site, title tags, meta tags, Alt tags, Sitemaps and more. Sounds confusing but it’s really not. Don’t start working on the external optimization of your website until the internal optimization has been completed.

External Optimization: This is the secret few people know and owning this knowledge can have your website exploding with massive traffic from very serious active shoppers. This is a process of building quality links to your website from other websites. Search Engines look at links that point to your site as votes so the more links (votes) you have pointing to your website the more important search engines think your site is and it becomes more likely that it will rank in the top of the search results. How important are links? On a scale of one to ten, probably eleven.

Proper knowledge of link building is one of the biggest contributing pieces to achieving top rankings on Google, AOL, Yahoo! and other search engines.

The first thing site owners need to do before getting started is use a free tool offered by Google (no downloads required) to find out how many people are searching for your products/services and what kinds of search terms they are typing to find them. If you have never used this tool then you just might be blown away when learn just how many people are looking for you online. To access this tool just go to do an internet search for "Google Keyword Tool" or see if Yahoo or AOL offer one.

So let’s say you own a Chiropractic office in New York and you want to use this tool to discover what type of search terms people are using to find your services and how many people are typing it. You would simply type in as many relevant search words or phrases as possible in the top box. You may need to type in a special captcha code to prove you are human.

Once you have entered your search terms it will show you how often those key words are being searched for each month, PLUS they even throw in other relevant terms that you may not have even thought of.

Most people might be surprised that nearly 10,000 people a month were searching for a Chiropractor in New York. Imagine the value of ranking #1 for that search term! You could dig even deeper and find a whole lot more searches for other relevant terms. You would also notice that more people search for "back pain" then those who search for "chiropractor". HOWEVER, achieving top rankings for the search term "back pain" or "Chiropractor" will be extremely difficult because there is so much competition. It would be easier to go after the search term "New York Chiropractors" or "New York City Chiropractor".

Before we move on, we need to give you a reality check. Unless you plan to invest tens of thousands of dollars DON’T try to optimize your website by going after narrow terms like "chiropractor" or "Dentist". You’ll be fighting against every Chiropractor or Dentist in the world and you WONT win. Besides most people don’t need traffic from customers that are 1,000 miles away from them. Instead go after less competitive (yet more localized) terms by adding something to the search term like the city name to the search term you are going after. This way you know you’re only investing in local traffic that can do business with you.

Once you have completed your research using the keyword tool it’s time to work on your title tags. The information you gathered from the report will come in very handy and help you choose the perfect title tag, which by the way is one of the absolute most important factors search engines consider when ranking your website. We’ve seen cases where just having the right title tag was all they needed to dramatically improve rankings on the web.

If you’re not sure how to change your title tags then call your webmaster or the company that built your website. Do not skip this critical step. Changing title tags is not rocket science and someone can do it for you if you can’t.

SO WHAT’S A TITLE TAG? The title tag is an HTML title element that is very important to both SEO and user experiences and is used to briefly and accurately describe the information that is found on a webpage. This title tag tells search engines what information is on that specific webpage. So if you have a web page that is for a Chiropractic office in New York then you might want the title tag on your home page to read "New York Chiropractors".

The title tag that you put on your website is what a user will see in the top line in Blue which is also underlined. If you were to click on the link you will normally see the exact same (text) title tag running across the very top of the webpage that the link sends you too.

What Title Tags mean to the user:

When someone performs a search on the internet they are presented with several links to choose from. The title is the first thing the user sees and it has a huge impact on which link someone might click on. For example, if I searched for "NY Chiropractors" I might be less likely to click a link where the title tag read "NewYork Office" as opposed to one that read "New York Chiropractic Office – Instant Back Pain Relief"

What Title Tags Mean to The Search Engine:

The title tag tells the search engine what kind of information is on each web page. Think of the title tag as the title of a book. If you saw a book with no title or a non relevant title you probably would just ignore it. If your keywords are not in the title tag the search engines may not really know what’s on the page and just ignore them or push it to the bottom pages. Want proof of how important the right title tags are? Google anything, that’s right, anything, and in almost every case you’ll see that all of the keywords you searched for will be in the title tags of the results that Google ranked in the top positions. Once you take this challenge you won’t doubt the importance of good title tags ever again.

How to Choose the Right Title Tag:

This is tricky so you’ll want to take your time and do it right. Whatever you do make sure the title tags are 100% relevant to what’s on the webpage because the search engines will know if the content is similar to your title tag and you don’t want to have your site penalized for bad practices. As discussed earlier, unless you have a lot of time and a big budget it’s usually best to go after less competitive yet still highly relevant search terms. Start by looking at Google Keyword report and get a good idea of what people are looking for.

If you own a brick and mortar business then it’s a no brainer, add your city to the search term you are targeting. The next thing you’ll want to do is find our how competitive the search terms you are going after really are and the best way to find that out is to see how many web pages on the internet placed each of those search terms in their title tags. You can be certain that if the terms are in someone’s title tags then they are your competition.

SECRET TIP: The secret to finding out how many web pages have a specific search term in their title tag is by doing what’s known as an Allintitle: search in Google. Sounds confusing, but it’s not. First, you go to Google and type in Allintitle: and then enter the exact search term you are considering going after. For example a chiropractor might type in AllinTitle:New York Chiropractors. If he did that he would see that there were 2,190,000 pages with that title tag (this number shown under the search bar). If on the other hand he typed Allintitle:New York City chiropractors he would find that there were 857,000 pages using that title tag. By the way, both of these are unusually highly competitive search terms and you would NOT see numbers even remotely near this high in most cities.

From the above AllinTitle: searches you might decide that these terms are just too competitive and consider other options. As a general rule anything over 3,000 is considered moderately competitive, 10,000 or more is very competitive and 20,000 or more becomes extremely competitive. If the Google keyword tool revealed there were 1,000 monthly searches for "NY Back pain relief" and an AllinTitle: search revealed only 500 competing WebPages had that term in their title tag - then that would very likely be an easy keyword to target and obtain top rankings for. Keep in mind, it is possible to out rank thousands of websites especially if they don’t know the secrets of link building. You might be surprised at how many people still have no clue about optimizing web pages and don’t have a link building strategy in place. And we say this with total confidence, "if they don’t have a link building strategy, you WILL in almost every occasion outrank them, period".

It’s best to limit your title tag to 5 - 7 words as Google doesn’t really look much further than that. Each page of your website should have is own unique title tag.

For ideas on title tags you can 1) Google one of your search terms, 2) click on one of the top ranked links, 3) check out what their title tags say on each of their pages (see example in Image # 2 above) and use the same ones, or similar ones on your site.

You’re done! And you’ll probably instantly see your rankings improve and move up in the search results. Once you combine a powerful link building strategy with your new title tags you will soar past most, if not all of your competition.

Content on your website:

Don’t over think this! You know your business so just make sure to write good quality content for each and everyone of your web pages and make sure it’s relevant to the title tag that you assign to it. In other words if your title tag for one of your web pages is "back pain relief" then the content on that page should talk mostly about back pain relief, not the need for x-rays.

Meta Tags:

As a reminder, if you don’t know where to enter your Meta tag data it’s a good idea to call your web master or ask someone who does know.

For those that really care about the definition, a meta tag is a line of HTML coding that contains metadata about a webpage. Your Meta tag information will not change the way your page looks. There are basically two types of meta tags - meta description tags and meta keywords tags.

Meta description tags describe, in some way, the webpage. For example if this book were on a webpage, our meta description might read "everything you need to know about SEO and Top rankings". A chiropractor might use "chiropractic services for relief of back pain and headaches" for their meta description. Note: each page should have its own meta description and meta keywords. The meta keyword tag lists other words that a visitor might be searching for, for example a chiropractor might use keywords like back injury, spinal adjustment, neck pain, headaches, etc.

The purpose of meta tags is to inform web crawlers about what’s on your web page and this is very important for search engine optimization (SEO).

The Meta description that you enter will be the words that will be seen under the title tag (on most search engines).

The meta description should be interesting and with relevant keywords.

META Keywords Rules:

1. Do not use more than 450 characters.

2. Do not stuff the same keyword over and over or your site may be penalized. As a general rule don’t use the same meta keyword on a page more than three or four times.

3. Separate each keyword with a comma.

4. ONLY use keywords which are relevant to the content on the corresponding page.

Site Map:

What is a Site Map? A Site map is a webpage that lists the contents and shows the structure of a website, to aid in navigation. Also used for search engines to crawl your website and find your other pages. The Site map is usually found at the bottom of the home page of most websites.

Once you have completed all of your internal optimization you can start your external optimization process. We will be writing about this and link building techniques in the near future. In the meantime a good way to get started is to get friends that own websites to link back to your website.