We have built our entire business by achieving numerous top rankings for terms relevant to our business. This attracts many interested customers seeking our services, who then contact us. Would you agree that warm, interested prospects contacting you is a good thing?

The first thing one needs to is to gain a deeper understanding of your audience. (Keyword Analysis) Your audience is using “keyword terms” to search for products or services such as yours. They may search on Google for “Arizona Real Estate” as an example. It is important to know what keywords people are using to search for your product or service, because these are the keywords we need to target to attract these customers. A useful online tool for researching keywords can be found at: http://inventory.overture.com/

Now we have isolated a dozen or so keywords for your business. Then we need to put them into your website in the appropriate places. (Keyword Density) Launch your HTML editor and place your keyword(s) in your title tag as a logical statement. Continue adding your keyword(s) to your pages description tag, and within topic headings tags, as well as image alt tags. Also modify any links to include keywords, rather than “Click Here” use links like “Learn more about Arizona Real Estate”.

Next craft copy for the page utilizing your keyword(s) and variations of those keyword(s). Such as, “ABC Real Estate company is the premier Arizona real estate company in the greater Phoenix area. We specialize in residential real estate, commercial real estate, and assisting real estate investors in all types of realty transactions.” Then you might create a link that reads, “Learn more about ABC’s Arizona real estate services.” As you can see it looks a little redundant but what we are doing is building relevancy of the page for the keywords.

Isolate keywords to specific pages: Choose just one or two keywords and dedicate an entire webpage to just those keywords. Search Engines rank pages individually as well as the entire website. Multiple pages of corresponding themes build relevancy of the entire website.

Rename pages, images, and directories using keywords. The final step to optimizing your website is to name your files with keywords: ie. Real-estate-logo.gif, and buy-arizona-homes.html. This concludes what you need to do ON your website. The rest of the SEO process takes places out in the Internet.

The search engines look for relevancy in two places: your website and other websites. If a popular website links to your website, then the search engines feel that your website is more relevant, and will increase your rankings. (Link Popularity) Try to get numerous quality links TO your website from other industry related websites. To do this you can ask the other website owner to trade links, pay for a link on their website, purchase placement in a online directory link Yahoo! or MSN small business directory. Note: Make sure the link text that is highlighted contains your keywords.

Press Releases: Another great way to build the online exposure of your business is to submit press releases to online distributors, such as prweb.com. Each press release will contain information describing your business using your keywords (relevancy) and a link back to your website.

Blog: Blogs are also a spectacular way of gaining links and online exposure. Simply write about what interests you, or some topic related to your business. They are fairly easy to setup on your own website, or you can use a hosted application like wordpress.com. Be careful to not self-promote or “blogvertise” as readers will shun your content. The benefit is that you will begin to build a library of relevant content and links to your website.

Rinse and Repeat: Continue to optimize your website pages, and gain incoming links to your website. Unfortunately top rankings do not happen overnight. Do not take any shortcuts as the search engine employ artificial intelligence that would make if the most tech savvy among us cringe. They will know, and you risk being banned.

There are applications available such as Web Position Gold® and Web CEO® that can do a fair amount of this work for you. Also you may consider hiring a professional who specializes in Search Engine Optimization to handle the entire process for you. Be sure to check past performance, and compliance with ethical practices, when hiring an SEO company.