"Get Your Website A #1 Ranking"

At first glance, search engine optimization can seem like a complicated subject. The key to increasing your websites SEO ranking, without breaking the bank, is by following the simple methods listed below. Many of these are low or no cost and will drive quality traffic to your site.

The Basics

The benefit of using SEO in your online marketing profit plan is once you get the ball rolling, you’ll generate free income and highly targeted free leads for a very long period of time with very little addition effort on your part.

The purpose of optimizing your website is so that search engines can easily search your site, navigate through it and categorize it. Not only do you need to build a graphically appealing site, you also need to make it informative and build a strong keyword based theme throughout the site. (I suggest you use Xsitepro to design your site. Best in its class, hands down.) 

Search engine optimization begins with choosing keywords and key phrases that fit your niche. This is the most important step so it needs to be done right. The best tool for doing this is Word Tracker. From here you will type your main keyword search term to see how much traffic each term gets on a daily basis.

While choosing your key phrases, you should visit your competitors's website. You cannot customize your website to reach its highest position without understanding how your competitors' reached theirs.  To see how many competing websites there are for your particular keyphrase, go to google.com and type in your keywords.

Next you will want to make a note of the top four website URL's and go to MarketLeap and check their "link popularity". If they have a link popularity larger than 2000, you will have your work cut out for you and you might consider targeting another niche.

Besides adding keyword rich content to your site, make sure you add a Title, Page Description and Keywords to each page. Also, include a site map page. Spiders can't index pages that can't be crawled. A site map will help spiders find all the important pages on your site, and help the spider understand your site's hierarchy. This is especially helpful if your site has a hard-to-crawl navigation menu. If your site is large, make several site map pages.

A great example of a small site with all the right characteristics is http://www.moleandwart.com

The next step is submitting your site to the online directories. This will increase your link and website popularity and search engine rankings.

These are a few of the free online directories you can submit your website to:

dmoz.org

submitexpress.com

freewebsubmission.com

Be Patient

This is just an overview of what it takes to increase your ranking on the search engines. SEO isn't about instant gratification. Results often take months to see, and this is especially true the smaller you are, and the newer you are to doing business online.

There are several software programs available for finding uncovered niches such as Micro Niche Finder.