Search Engine Optimisation is a big scary topic for a lot of
people, but it doesn't have to be. The principles behind it are
all pretty simple, and these tips will take less than an hour to
implement, but should boost your rankings significantly!

1-Don't shoot for the moon. By that I mean don't go out there
and choose the most competitive keyword in your field. Chances
are that the #1 ranked site for the most competitive term has
been there for some years. Why should your site suddenly come
along and oust them in short order? Instead, focus on longer,
less competitive phrases. Use keyword selection tools to help
you find them. You will find longtail phrases are more targeted
also as it means the searchers have a more focused idea of what
they are looking for.

2-Make sure you put your main keyword/phrase in the page title,
and also in the footer. The title is the first thing the search
engines will look at, so it's important to let them know exactly
what we are about as early as possible, and it's also good to
make the main phrase the last thing they see. A fundamental tip,
but something 99% of webmasters do not do.

3-Switch your navigation. Most web pages have the navigation
bars on the left or along the top. This is not good from an SEO
point of view. Search engines read pages in vertical strips,
starting on the left, then gradually moving across. The problem
that the navigation presents is that 98% of web navigation menus
are the same or very similar-this means that with the navigation
in the same place as everyone else's, we are telling the engines
that our web site is the same as everyone else's. They will see
our super relevant page title, and then read our navigation
links, which are not likely to be keyword relevant at all, and
then conclude that this site is not all that relevant to their
beloved searchers, and consign it to page 558 or something. This
is NOT what we want! If we put the navigation on the right
instead, we can then put lots of interesting content on the
left, so it's the first thing they see after they read our page
title.

4-Make sure your content is original, and READABLE. Who stays on
a website after they realise the content is nothing but keyword
stuffed garbage? I certainly don't, and neither will your
customers. It's very important that your keywords are in your
content, but make sure it's in a relevant fashion-I think the
best term I have heard for it is "sprinkled." Sprinkle the
keywords through the content of the page. It's also useful to
embolden them occasionally and italicise them, as the search
engines then assume they are important words regarding your site
and content, which is exactly what we want them to think.

5-Use the heading tags, etc. That's what they are there for,
and yes the search engines do pay attention to them. It's
especially useful if you can use your main keywords as headings,
or part of headings. For example, if your site is about extreme
skydiving techniques, your heading may be "My favourite extreme
skydiving techniques" or something like that. A good technique
in certain cases is to combine two phrases, but you need to be
careful as you don't want to damage the readability of the
phrase- For example, you may have "Top Rated Extreme Skydiving
Techniques" as a heading if your targeted phrases were "extreme
skydiving techniques" and "top rated skydiving techniques," and
you would likely get ranked for both these phrases from doing
that. Be careful though, as it's easy to get carried away and
reduce the quality of the content in this fashion.

6-Don't put all your eggs into one basket, or one
keyword.phrase. As we said before, it's unlikely for a new
website to choose the most popular phrase in a category and come
straight in and take #1 on Google. The sites that rank #1 for
such phrases are very established and will have thousands of
backlinks built up over the years, and for that reason alone
will be very difficult to oust. What we can do though, is choose
ten less popular phrases, and make a different page for each
one, or each pair. We can have the same items for sale etc on
each page, but you can make the content custom written for each
phrase. This is a great way to exponentially get more traffic,
as you will have multiplied your market presence by ten.
Obviously, the sky is the limit with this strategy; you could
have 50 or 1000 subdomains all pulling in search engine visitors
for different phrases. You only need 5 or 10 visitors to each
page, and if you have a hundred pages that's 500 or 1000
visitors each day.

So there you have it-these techniques will take less than an
hour to implement, and will guarantee an increase in your search
engine rankings-What are you waiting for?

About the author:
David Raybould has been an internet marketer for just over a
year and in July this year was able to quit his day job through
online earnings. He is eager to help others buck the trend of
the dreaded day job and you can find useful info and resources
at his site http://www.no-more9to5.com, and join his newsletter
by sending a blank email to no-more9to5@getresponse.com