Perhaps one of the more misunderstood facets of search engine optimization is the fact that it isn’t completing one action, it is a combination of many completed actions. When all of our efforts come together, and complement each other, you have a classic!

Getting top listings doesn’t come by accident. If you know SEO techniques you should try to build them into your site as you build it. That is probably not your situation and you have a site built by someone else and it needs to be optimized. I suggest that your focus your first efforts on optimization after you have a completed site.

It will be of great benefit to you if you learn some good solid SEO skills before you start making changes to your site. If you simply start making changes you will not know why your listings may change, if they do. An often made mistake is keyword stuffing or over using important techniques like H1 tags and so on.

There is a difference between using a keyword five times on a page, and 50 times. The engines want to find sites that appear natural, and if you ask me, do not appear to have been optimized! This is very important, and a lot more important than most people ever will realize. The sites that seem to rank the best are those that do not appear to be excessively optimized, and have lots and lots of inbound links using many different keyword combinations for anchor text … yes, even “Click Here”.

SEO is common sense, but it is even more than that. It is understanding how different html tags works together, and how the search engines will perceive that. It is a lot of trial and error which will, in the end, lead you to good solid and proper optimization techniques. All of this will lead you to better search engine rankings.

The one thing that will make your business profitable is getting listings on the top of the results pages. This is called “above the fold”, the part of the search engines results page (SERP) that displays WITHOUT scrolling.

You will get 99% of your traffic from Google, MSN and Yahoo! No doubt about that. You need to optimize your site for these engines. By this I mean take each page of your site and optimize each part of the page for these engines.

The first things to get straightened out on your site is the use of the title tag, I like to keep it under 12 words, the code attributes (alt=, title=, summary=), meta description and keywords, H1 tags, H2 tags, keyword density, your navigation and the anchor text used and internal linking. These items are among the major improvements you need to make to all of your web pages.