Search Engine Optimization: A loaded phrase that floats around the online world, but the ‘how to’ part is like a foreign language to most people. Do you want to figure out how to achieve a higher ranking on search engine results page? Here it is, laid out in 9 simple steps:

1. Brainstorming – write down 20-30 phrases that best describe your business. What products or services are most important and most profitable? Make sure they are suitable for online  sales
2. Search Popularity   – the next step is to see what phrases are the most popular in searches by your potential customers. A great tool to use is Google’s Keyword Popularity Tool
3. Competition – don’t forget to research your competition and see what is working for them
4. Choose keywords – after your research on popular, relevant keywords, it is time to make a decision. The most important phrase should be used for your homepage, while other phrases (10-25 depending on the size of your site) should be chosen for the remainder of your website
5. Site Structure – the best case scenario would be that you are building your website and incorporating SEO site from the beginning. Each important phrase should have a separate website page. For instance, if you are a site promoting soccer services, one page should be devoted to each of your services. Eg. Soccer camp, soccer conditioning, and soccer apparel should each have their own page
6. Domain & URLS – your important phrases should be placed in the URL of each page. Eg. ‘Soccer Camp’ should appear in the beginning of your URL with no words preceding it
7. HTML tags – on top of your domain and URLs, the keywords should be placed in the title tag, alt tags, image title, meta description tag, keyword meta tag, H1/H2, and strong tags for greater searchability
8. Keyword density – the important phrase should be mentioned several times on the page of the site. This includes the text heading, text subheading, copy, and internal links.
9. Link building – Finally, the last step of SEO is to increase links to your page. This could be done by building great content, submitting your site to search engines like Google and Yahoo/MSN, exchanging links with relevant sites in industry, becoming a member of various relevant associations or advertising on other sites.

I hope that these steps helped to demystify the world of search engine optimization for you. Enjoy those extra views and clicks!