Here's a thought... There are literally BILLIONS of webpages published and available today on the world wide web. And tomorrow, there will be a hundred thousand more! And what's more, there are hundreds of thousands of webpages competing with you just in your INDUSTRY!

So how will people find your "needle in the haystack"?

When a user enters a search query into Google, their 'bots' search the index for matching pages; and they return the results they believe are the MOST RELEVANT to the user. Relevancy is determined by OVER 200 FACTORS, one of which is the "PageRank" for a given page.

Although we won't get in to all 200 of Google's "relevancy" factors here, there are a few simple, yet critical, techniques you can use to hammer-out the more major contributing factors for SEO.

Important! Keyword/keyphrase research for your industry and/or topic is CRITICAL, and it's assumed that this has already been done; and the best few keywords/keyphrases have been chosen.

Major contributing factors for SEO are found in the
following rules

• Rule #1: The page URL should match the page TITLE, or at least have the SAME keywords, even if out of order.
  Example:
  • Page URL - www.mysite.com/red-car-fast/
  • Page Title - My Fast Red Car
• Rule #2: Page TITLE should match the HEADLINE (h1) with LESS variation (meaning, same order).
  Example:
  • Page Title - My Fast Red Car
  • Page Headline (h1) - My Very Fast Red Car
  • Your keyword/keyphrase SHOULD: Be the BEGINNING of your page title, as its value diminishes with each preceding word.
  • Also, your keyword/keyphrase SHOULD: Be the BEGINNING of your headlines (h1).
• Rule #3: HEADLINES, including sub-headlines (h2, h3, etc), should be EXACTLY repeated (at LEAST two times) in the subsequent paragraph(s).
  Example:
  • Page Headline - My Very Fast Red Car
  • Page Content - "Yatta, yatta, yatta, I hope I don't wreck my very fast red car."
  • Your keyword/keyphrase SHOULD: Be linked as a hypertext link (at least twice), as the text within anchor tags have more page SEO value vs. unlinked text.
• Rule #4: TEXT CONTENT of the article/page MUST maintain keyword/keyphrase usage throughout. This includes both a) on-page text and b) meta data (text attributes placed within html tags).
  Examples of keywords/keyphrases being used in meta data are:
  • a href="www.mysite.com/red-car-fast/" title="fast red car website page"/a
  • img src="www.mysite.com/red-car.jpg" alt="my fast red car image" /
  • button name="fast red car newsletter subscribe"click here/button
  • Important! A good rule of thumb is to have your MAIN keyword/keyphrase make up approx. 1.5% to 2% of the total text/content on the page (occurring 1 to 2 times per/100 words). This is called "keyword density."
  • It's STRONGLY recommended to optimize a page for THREE to FIVE keywords/keyphrases. Your SECONDARY keywords/keyphrases should have a keyword density of approx .5% to 1% of the total text/content on the page.

What is the keyword or keyphrase being searched?

Simply put, the idea is to MATCH or MIRROR what people are putting into the browser search field; so ask yourself, what is the keyword or keyphrase being searched? (Did you notice that I repeated the preceeding subheadline here..??).

In the end, we need to optimize a particular webpage for some keywords in order to be found. Your page will not show up in Google's search results by accident. In order to have real, predictable results, you have to be DELIBERATE with your preparation and publication of webpages.