Top 5 Search Engine Optimization Tips by Catherine Seda

You can’t resist it.

You nervously type keywords relevant to your business into a search engine. A list of web sites appears. Oh no! You spot several competitors. But where’s your site? You frown. It’s not there.

By not being at the top of search engines, you’re probably losing an extra $10,000 a month or more in new business.

You need search engine marketing—now.

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps your site show up in the organic listings. Pay-per-click (PPC) helps your site show up in the paid listings. Both listings typically appear on a search engine’s results page.
Organic listings are free. Who doesn’t want free traffic? Free is fabulous. That’s why so many business professionals want to do SEO. It helps your web site get free rankings. Although SEO takes months, and rankings are never guaranteed, it’s worth it.

Ready to uncover 5 simple SEO tactics?

Create Money-Making “Title” Meta Tags Each web site page can contain a meta title tag, meta description tag and meta keyword tag. These meta tags tell search engines what that page is about. You can use relevant keywords in each of these tags.Are meta tags dead? Yes and no. They worked great when I first used them for clients way back in 1996. Today, meta tags won’t improve your rankings by themselves. But they’re still part of a solid SEO foundation. You NEED the meta title tag. Here’s an example:
<title>Find Over 250 Gardening Tools on Sale Now</title>

Your title tag is often the title that appears in the organic search results.That said, write a title tag that’ll entice search engine users to click your listing and do business with you! Grab their attention before your competitors do.
Write a Headline that Turns Heads Ready to turn visitors into customers? Then use persuasive headlines on your web site pages.Why?
If you don’t hook visitors in 30 seconds or less, you’ll lose ‘em. This is your headline’s job. That’s why it’s the most important line of copy on your page.

Headlines are critical places to include keywords. So, don’t let your webmaster turn yours into pretty graphics—spiders can’t see graphics, they can only read text (geek speak coming…tell your webmaster to use an <h1> to an <h6> tag).
Optimize Keywords in Your Site Copy Evenly distribute your keywords throughout your page copy. Spiders will notice.For example, you can’t mention your keywords once out of 500 words. How is a spider supposed to figure out what that page is about? If it doesn’t know, it can’t rank that page for anything.
Now don’t overdo it. If you repeat your keywords so many times that you annoy humans, that’s spam. Instead, sprinkle your keywords a few times throughout a page. That’s a safe start if you’re new to SEO.
NEVER Hide Keywords or You’ll Get Banned Never hide keywords to trick spiders (meta tags are fine). That’s spam. If caught, your site will be banned from the search engines! Not good. Never use any of these old spam tricks:
• Don’t hide keywords by using white text on a white background
• Don’t hide keywords in text so tiny no human could read them
• Don’t hide keywords in images (using, not over-stuffing, keywords in an ALT image tag is fine)

Put keywords where humans can see them. That’s good SEO.
Get Quality Links to Look Like an ExpertSearch engines want expert resources to rank well. That means you’ve got to get your site to look like an expert. Here’s an easy way to do that…get links from high-quality web sites (and blogs). Hold on. Not all links are created equal. To make your links count, ask for (or even buy) links from sites that have content similar to yours.
For example, if you sell garden tools, don’t ask your cousin Vinny to link to you from his sailboat site. That won’t work. Instead, buy a link from www.Garden.org, the National Gardening Association. That’s an authority site and it’s relevant. It even has great search engine rankings and probably gets a whole lot of traffic.

Getting quality links is a critical SEO tactic.

These are simple steps for getting started, right? Good. SEO isn’t magic; it just takes a little time and knowledge to catapult your web site to the top!

Catherine Seda is a 12-year Internet marketing veteran and Entrepreneur columnist. She’s author of the new book “How to Win Sales & Influence Spiders: Boosting Your Business & Buzz on the Web.” Want to know why you could be losing $10K, $100K or over $1 million a month on the web? Then get Catherine’s new book at http://www.HowToWinSalesAndInfluenceSpiders.com before your competitors do!

Technorati Tags: Catherine Seda, search engine optimization, optimization tips, search engine, pay-per-click, meta tags