Write Great Content » I’ve worked with many web clients who want their site to be ranked high in the search engines, and want people to be able to find their site by searching for all sorts of keywords, problem is they don’t want to put in the work of writing good content (or pay a professional to do the writing). If you’re content isn’t good, your SEO won’t be good either. Period. And don’t just copy-and-paste from a competitor’s site with good rankings, your content needs to be unique.

Keep Content Fresh » Sites with newer content are often viewed as more relevant and reliable. Take advantage of this and keep your content up-to-date and relevant.

Choose Your Keyword Phrase Wisely » Too many people want to treat keywords and SEO like shooting a shotgun just hoping something will hit. I like to tell our clients to be very specific and choose just a very specific few keyword phrases to concentrate on first for just the homepage. Make certain that keyword phrase is popular (but not too popular – You’ll get more pageviews from a less popular keyword when you’re on the first page of the search engines, than from a super popular keyword that you only make it to page 50 of search engines.), describes what you are actually selling/advertising, and is something people would actually search for.

Use Your Keyword Phrase In Your Page’s Title » The title tag is one of the most important tags on your entire Web page. Placing your keyword phrase in the title tag is very important to get that phrase into the search engines and get your site ranked higher.

Use Your Keyword Phrase In Your Page’s Headings and Links » After the title tags, the Heading tags (<h1></h1>, <h2></h2>, and <h3></h3>) and links are the next most important tags in your web page, respectively. Both of these sets of tags have higher visibility than the rest of the surrounding text, and also more influence on your site’s ranking.

Use Your Keyword Phrase An Appropriate Amount » What is an “appropriate amount” you might ask? Well, the ratio of your keywords to the rest of the text on your page is called the keyword density. Keyword density should be between 3 and 7% for your primary keyword phrase and 1-2% for any secondary keywords or keyword phrases. So make certain to repeat your keyword phrase, but not excessively.