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What are Three Simple Secrets of Search Engine Optimization? Simple because its just so easy. Secret since its so easy, that website owners and developers don't spend the time doing it, nor doing it competantly.

SearchMasters rank top for the search phrase Search Engine Optimisation on Google.co.nz. They train website developers and individual clients, as well as SEO'ing and Google online marketing an ever increasing number of websites. The majority of web sites that SearchMasters are asked to help, fail in these three simple search engine optimisation secrets including some web developers own websites.

1. Selecting Search Phrases
2. Adding the selected phrases to the html head
3. Adding phrases to the pages content

While there are a large number of other things that are needed for proper Search Engine Optimisation, the above should be the 1st steps to search engine optimising any page on a site. Too many people focus 1stly on inbound links, and yet the words on their pages are not properly targeted. With inbound links strategy, you need to target the key words selected, and have them as link text. But without first choosing the proper key words, link building is not worth much.

1. Search Phrase Selection

What words are people searching on Google for - use the Google Keyword Selection tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

• pick the country that you are targeting
• pick "exact" match - not broad match since you are after traffic for the exact phrase
• sort by the "Local Search Volume" column

Think about regionalization - your country, city, region, suburb name in the search phrase

Think about categorisation - what categories do your services or products fit into.

Competition Analysis

Search on your target Google domain (ie Google.com, or Google.ca, etc) and use the SEO Tools for Firefox plugin.

I set the SEO for Firefox tool to show Google PR with an automatic 1 second update, and Yahoo site links as the same.

I think about my clients web site and its current Google PR and incoming links, and assess against the competitors PR and incoming links. Am I able to get the client into the top ten? Or is there an alternative phrase that maybe has less traffic, but is easier to achieve.

What search phrases per page

Pick the most competitive, but reachable search phrases for the homepage - the general category that you are selling your services or goods into.

Pick 1 other page of your site as a second page for each of the targeted homepage keywords. This gives you the possibility of an indented result for the Google search - two results out of ten for a normalusual google search. Having a page that is able to be an indented result will often lift the ranking of your main page even if the 2nd page is not specifically showing.

If you are an shopping cart web site, think about all the other different categories that your products could fit into. Create a page for each key word or groups of search phrases.

2. Adding the search phrases to the html head of the document

• title
• meta description

Title

Google shows 70 characters for the title of each page in its standard results. If you have over seventy characters, it cuts off at the closest word, and adds 4 characters " ..." one space and three dots. If adding those characters takes it over the seventy characters, then it cuts off another word from the end of the title.

Therefore if you keep to the maximum seventy characters in the title, you keep the highest level of control over what Google shows, and you have the max number of your characters showing.

The meta title is the most important part of SEO in as much as everything is important. There can only be one "1st word" in a meta title. Google for something, and generally you will see the search phrase move to the left, the further down the search results you look.

So often website owners add the business name to the front of their title. The search phrase should come first, then the brand name/web site name at the end IF/IF and only if    there is room for it.

For shopping cart websites, you can have a programed formula for the title - the product or category of the web page.

Meta description

Google shows 155 characters of the meta description if you search for single/double/triple word phrases. For longer search phrases, Google will show longer snippets. For instance for a five word search phrase it can show up to around 240 characters.

I prefer to keep my meta descriptions to the max 155 characters. Otherwise, Google cuts off the snippet and adds the " ..." space and three dots at the end, cutting off some words. If a long search phrase is Googled for, then I let Google pick the snippet from the 155 character meta description, in addition to words on the page.

The meta description is not used for ranking a website (it has zero weighting in the algorithm). But a good meta description will get you click throughs even if you don't rank high.

Use the main search phrases from your title and add a unique selling point for your web site.

An excellent meta description means a good snippet on Google, and more clicks even for lower rankings.

3. Adding to the content of the page

H1

My formula is to have an H1 then an opening paragraph. The H1 signifies that the content is starting, and helps distinguish between the footer, menus, header etc of the page. I have a more basic version of the main search phrase - just one of the search phrases of the page title. Simple and readable. Like "SearchMasters - SEO Consulting / SEO Training"

Opening paragraph

So often I find that people are targeting a keyword phrase, yet that phrase is not included in the content of the page. The EXACT phrase needs to be on the web page. Since the website homepage is so powerful, you can have phrases that are related to the title,  in the content of the page and get good rankings for them. For instance "Search Engine Optimisation" might be in the title of your page, but you would also be able to get ranked for the American spelling Search Engine Optimization, or "Search Engine Optimization Consultant", or a regional "City Search Engine Optimisation" ...

Since you can not get all your phrases into the opening paragraph, you might need additional paragraphs to keep it readable. You don't want keyword stuffing.

You need at least say 250 characters of text including the main search phrases with no links in that text. The opening paragraph content of a page should be "The Answer", not directing to another page that has "The Answer". Further down the document you certainly can have links to other resources.

If you have too small an amount of unique text as compared to header/footer/menu text, then your page is less likely to get cached and ranked on Google. Ecommerce websites

Don't use your header/footer/menu text as text that you are trying to get a page ranked for. That text is not unique to any one page on your website, and is therefore not proper user information in the eyes of Google.

Unique text

You need unique words around the first instance of your search phrase in content on the page. If you are using a suppliers description for a product or category, add some auto generated text as your opening paragraph

like "Purchase productname on bestshopping, the place for all your cheap productname."

What does "Unique" mean? Do a Google search putting quote marks around the search phrase and the word before and after that phrase. That specific phrase ought to be unique for your website. But often you will find that other sites have copied it. So change your opening paragraph formula, or change the words before and after your search phrase, and make the content unique again. When others copy your content Google will often not rank you as high. Sites that are not very powerful will suffer in the rankings more than powerful sites that get copied.

I am often having to rewrite meta descriptions and content for my clients Car Rental Auckland very competitive website. When you rank top ten on Google for popular phrases like in the car rental industry, so many more people copy your content, and search engine rankings can often go down when too many people copy content.

So there you have it -Search Engine Optimisation's Three Simple Secrets. Follow the simple secrets, and you will have a good base for adding incoming links into your web site and ranking top ten on Google and the other search engines.

Michael Brandon is a leading NZ Search Engine Optimization consultant training web developers, and web owners, and Search Engine Optimizing websites worldwide.