Here are the five simple steps to ranking high on the search engines. Get these five things right and you will be way ahead of 90% of your competition.

1. Select the right keywords. Don't waste time trying to optimize your site until you have selected the very best three to five keyword phrases for your site.

   Right now WordTracker is offering a 7-day free trial of their keyword selection tool absolutely free with nothing held back. Below is the link to their free trial:

   https://www.wordtracker.com/trial/

   Google's Keyword Tool is a free keyword tool that I highly recommend also:

   https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

2. Get your Title tag right. Google looks at the first 64 characters and spaces in the Title tag. Your Title tag can be longer, but Google won't see anything past the 64 characters and spaces.

   To rank high for any keyword or phrase it almost has to be included in the Title tag. The first three to five words are very important, so put your most important keywords at the very beginning of the Title tag.

   Your Title tag doesn't have to be a grammatically correct sentence, but don't make it just a list of keywords. It needs to somewhat be a sentence.

   By all means, don't waste valuable space in your Title tag by including your domain name. You will rank high for this anyway. Including a URL in the Title tag is the single biggest mistake I see when analyzing websites for SEO.

3. Use your keywords and keyword phrases in your h1 headlines and in your h2 sub-heads and in the text on your page.

   It doesn't do any good to include any word or phrase in your Title tag if it's not used on your site. And to rank high for any word or phrase it needs to be used in the headlines and sub-heads. Also, include your important keywords in bold at least one time on your page. But don't put a keyword in bold the first time it's used on the page.

   Don't over do it by just inserting keywords in your text. Google will call this keyword spamming and penalize your site for it. There's no magic number but I like the 0.5% to 2% range. The most important thing is for the text on your site to read naturally. Google and your readers will both ignore your site if it doesn't.

   One way to look at it is that if Google was judging a beauty contest, bride's maids and homecoming queens wouldn't win. The girl that was in your history class with the pony tail would win. Google doesn't like anything that looks artificial.

   Be sure to have 300 to 700 actual words on your site. Google doesn't see Java script.

4. Incoming links are extremely important. Your links need to be on-topic and from trusted sites to be useful. Having a few reciprocal links (fewer than 30%) is fine IF they are on-topic. Off topic reciprocal links are useless. One-way links are the best.

   Writing articles and having them published on other sites is a great way to get your links included within the text of an article. (Google likes natural looking links within an article and surrounded by keywords.)

   It's very important to get your keywords in your anchor text. A lot of people linking to your site won't know how to include anchor text within a link. (I like to have a "Link to Us" page on my sites to show them exactly how to do this.) For an example of a "Link to Us" page see:

   http://www.searchengineu.com/public/department25.cfm

5. Get your Description tag and keywords tag right. Your Description and your Keywords tags don't have anything to do with ranking high in the search engines, but here's why I'm including them in this list.

   Most of the time (not always) Google pulls the first 158 characters and spaces word-for-word from your Description tag to use as the text in their Search Engine Results Page to describe your site.

   You should consider your Description tag to be an ad for your site. After all, if this text doesn't convince people to click and visit your site, being ranked high is not going to help you.

   Most people use their Keyword tag as a wish list and include a long string of keywords. This is a total waste. Google doesn't even look at your Keyword tag. (Yahoo looks at it but doesn't give it much weight.)

   Use your Keyword tag as a reminder to yourself of which three to five keywords you are trying to optimize the page for. Every web page should be optimized for a different set of keywords (and of course, have a different Title tag).

In summary: There's no big mystery to ranking high in the search engines -- just get the basics right and then continue to get on-topic incoming links

To take a look at your site and see what Google sees, hit "Control U" while you are on your site and you can check out your Title tag, Description tag, your h1 headline, h2 sub-heads and the text on your page. This is a good place to start.

To show you what to look for, I went to the website of one of the members of this site and hit "Control U" and below is a screen capture showing the Title tag, Description tag, Keywords tag, etc. exactly as it showed up. The red arrow points to the Title tag. You can see the Description tag and Keywords tag right above the the Title tag.

Note: (The "Control U" function is the same as going to the top menu and clicking "View" and then clicking on "Page Source" in the drop-down menu. This is for a PC. If you have a Mac, you have to do it a little different. I think you use View Page Source or Apple U.)

Bottom line: Yes, there are more things you can do to rank high in the search engines, but get the five basics things right as described above and you will be way ahead of 90% of your competition.

To see some of the advanced ways to rank higher in the search engines go to:

www.SearchEngineU.com