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Search Engine Optimisation is a big scary topic for a lot of people, but it doesn't have to be. The principles behind it are all pretty simple, and these tips will take less than an hour to implement, but should boost your rankings significantly!

1-Don't shoot for the moon. By that I mean don't go out there and choose the most competitive keyword in your field. Chances are that the #1 ranked site for the most competitive term has been there for some years. Why should your site suddenly come along and oust them in short order? Instead, focus on longer, less competitive phrases. Use keyword selection tools to help you find them. You will find longtail phrases are more targeted also as it means the searchers have a more focused idea of what they are looking for.

2-Make sure you put your main keyword/phrase in the page title, and also in the footer. The title is the first thing the search engines will look at, so it's important to let them know exactly what we are about as early as possible, and it's also good to make the main phrase the last thing they see. A fundamental tip, but something 99% of webmasters do not do.

3-Switch your navigation. Most web pages have the navigation bars on the left or along the top. This is not good from an SEO point of view. Search engines read pages in vertical strips, starting on the left, then gradually moving across. The problem that the navigation presents is that 98% of web navigation menus are the same or very similar-this means that with the navigation in the same place as everyone else's, we are telling the engines that our web site is the same as everyone else's. They will see our super relevant page title, and then read our navigation links, which are not likely to be keyword relevant at all, and then conclude that this site is not all that relevant to their beloved searchers, and consign it to page 558 or something. This is NOT what we want! If we put the navigation on the right instead, we can then put lots of interesting content on the left, so it's the first thing they see after they read our page title.

4-Make sure your content is original, and READABLE. Who stays on a website after they realise the content is nothing but keyword stuffed garbage? I certainly don't, and neither will your customers. It's very important that your keywords are in your content, but make sure it's in a relevant fashion-I think the best term I have heard for it is 'sprinkled.' Sprinkle the keywords through the content of the page. It's also useful to embolden them occasionally and italicise them, as the search engines then assume they are important words regarding your site and content, which is exactly what we want them to think.

5-Use the heading tags, etc. That's what they are there for, and yes the search engines do pay attention to them. It's especially useful if you can use your main keywords as headings, or part of headings. For example, if your site is about extreme skydiving techniques, your heading may be 'My favourite extreme skydiving techniques' or something like that. A good technique in certain cases is to combine two phrases, but you need to be careful as you don't want to damage the readability of the phrase- For example, you may have 'Top Rated Extreme Skydiving Techniques' as a heading if your targeted phrases were 'extreme skydiving techniques' and 'top rated skydiving techniques,' and you would likely get ranked for both these phrases from doing that. Be careful though, as it's easy to get carried away and reduce the quality of the content in this fashion.

6-Don't put all your eggs into one basket, or one keyword.phrase. As we said before, it's unlikely for a new website to choose the most popular phrase in a category and come straight in and take #1 on Google. The sites that rank #1 for such phrases are very established and will have thousands of backlinks built up over the years, and for that reason alone will be very difficult to oust. What we can do though, is choose ten less popular phrases, and make a different page for each one, or each pair. We can have the same items for sale etc on each page, but you can make the content custom written for each phrase. This is a great way to exponentially get more traffic, as you will have multiplied your market presence by ten. Obviously, the sky is the limit with this strategy; you could have 50 or 1000 subdomains all pulling in search engine visitors for different phrases. You only need 5 or 10 visitors to each page, and if you have a hundred pages that's 500 or 1000 visitors each day.

So there you have it-these techniques will take less than an hour to implement, and will guarantee an increase in your search engine rankings-What are you waiting for?