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Let's face it: There are googols of information about getting high ranking in Google. As a loyal student of Brad Callen's, I believe he is one of the few who have a solid grasp on what works and what doesn't in SEO and site ranking. I'll try to keep this short and sweet as I boil down the 10 vital steps to boost your SE ranking by hundreds, maybe even thousands of pages:

1. Your title should only be your main keyword. Not too long; the shorter the better, and easier for indexing.

2. The first copy on your page, or the header, should be in h1 header tags.

3. Add h1 header tags. This can be a sub heading for your webpage. You should place your 2nd most important keyword in the h2 header tag. The h2 tag should be placed somewhere in the top half of your webpage.

4. Bold, underline, or italicize some of the keywords one time each, maximum. Only 1 per keyword or it will hurt more than help. Not a crucial step, but creating a little "style" here and there will help.

5. Write your keywords to flow in a natural way throughout your copy, but be sure to include at least one of the keywords per 1-2 paragraphs, depending on how large your page is.

6. Use <alt> tags for images. Something I never did, but will now! Again, be careful on how you name them as not to appear too spammy. Example: For the keyword garden, your first image could be garden image 1, and for your second image, use your next keyword: raised garden graphic 2...etc. - just a little different but keeping your main keywords.

7. Name your images after the main keywords: garden_image1.jpg, garden_image2.jpg, etc.

8. Strategically place your main keyword once at the very beginning, and once at the very end. At the bottom, it could appear like:
© 2005 copyright www.domain.com a site about gardening

9. Make sure Google reads your keywords first - Very important! Many, many people make this mistake: Putting their navigation links in the left hand column. Google indexes your page top left to right, which means the nav links will be indexed before your keywords! To get around this, here's what you do: You can still create your nav links on the lefthand side, but - create a column JUST ABOVE the nav column, with your keyword(s). Google will read the top first, then that top left column with your keyword, then will move laterally to the right to read the main copy.

10. Do Offsite Marketing

What this means is:

Which websites link to you
The number of websites linking to you
The Google page rank of the website linking to you
The page title of the website linking to you
The anchor text used in the link linking to you
The number and type of links linking to the website that's linking to you.
The number of outbound links on the website that is linking to you
The total number of links on the website that is linking to you
Whether or not the websites linking to you are deemed by Google as an authority website.

To learn more about offsite marketing, I recommend Brad Callen's Article, How To Skyrocket Your Website To The Top Of Google With Properly Planned Offpage Optimization