Search engines rank sites based on relevancy – content is King! The search engines realize that the more relevant their listings are, the more people will like their service and use them. Basic!

Google is a prime example of this. The famous Google Bot which is in charge of "checking" websites and adding them to the Google index is a lot smarter than it used to be. It looks over the content of your entire website, not just a single page. It will then determine what your website is relevant to and make a decision. It will decide whether or not to include your page in the natural listings or not. Upon choosing to add your site, it will then determine what keyword (s) to list it under and where it will be ranked within the results. This is where and why you need to fine tune your website and optimize for the keywords YOU WANT!

Regardless of how "pretty" your website is, content is what the search engine spiders look at. When a spider hits your page it is going to scan the entire website, including the links that you have on your page. It will determine if you meet the minimum content requirement to be listed in their directory. The content on your page needs to have some "BULK" to it . By this we mean that you should write multiple paragraphs on your page using relevant words to what it is that you want to be listed under. The spider can't read your images – but they can read the image file names – why not name your images using some of your relevant keywords?

Keyword Density

Having the right keyword density is one aspect of the SEO "game" that you can control. If you want your web page to be listed for the phrase "dog training", you need to make sure that this phrase appears multiple times within the text on your website. A keyword density of between 2% and 5% is a general rule that you can follow. This will make the focus keyword/phrase apparent to the search engine spiders and will get you a better chance of being listed for this keyword.

Multi-Page Sites

Having a multi-page site is becoming more and more important to the search engines. Single landing pages with no links to other pages on the same domain are very rarely listed in top positions. Make your page a multi-level site. All you need to do is create a number of relevant web pages, and link them all together. This isn't as difficult as it sounds. Instead of one page of 2000 words – break it up into 4 pages of 500 words each.

Title:

You ALWAYS want to have your focus keyword/phrase in the title of your page. When you do get listed, the search engines use the title tag as the first line of the listing. So make sure your title is catchy and highly relevant to what your focus keyword is.

Incoming links

Incoming links to your page do still play a roll in your search listings, but it is nothing like it used to be. It is important that when you do get links, you work on "one-way" links...or pages that only link to your site, not link back. Also, make sure that you aim to get links to your page on relevant websites. A good way to do this is through industry partners, forums, and social bookmarking websites. In addition you want these links to be from high page rank sites.

Focus Keywords:

Make sure that your focus keywords do not have millions of previously indexed sites. Your chances will be very low if you are trying to get a top listing for a saturated and highly competitive keyword. Instead, look for targeted keywords with a smaller search competition. If a keyword is being searched 1,000 or even 500 times a month; that's 1000 or 500 visitors that you will have compared to zero if you try to compete against those millions!