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Everyone in business soon learns that the best traffic comes from the search engines, and they’re anxious to see their websites in the search engine results pages (SERPs). A set series of actions will help to insure that this happens, but it won’t happen overnight. You have to have a set plan of action.

To perform search engine optimization (SEO) properly, you want to get page rank for every page in your site, but it’s not possible to do that overnight. The best thing to do is to start with your home page, the page you want people to go to see your offer or opt-in to your list or whatever it is, and work with that because Google ranks pages, not whole websites.

But it doesn’t have to be that difficult. Here are three simple steps that will boost your rankings in search:

1. Diligent keyword research

Go to any keyword discovery tool, like Google’s External Keyword Discovery tool, and plug in a very generic term for your niche. Then, look down the list and start refining from there. Find words that apply to your niche and dig down. See if there are other more specific terms that people are searching for. The more specific your keyword, the more likely the searcher is looking to buy.

Be sure that the keyword has between 3,000 and 10,000 searches a month, and that will usually be a term that isn’t quite as competitive as others. Yet, it will still get enough traffic to drive your business.

Check out the competition for that keyword by typing it into Google and seeing what comes back. See how many links the top sites have, and if you can compete. If you find that every site on page 1 has a gazillion backlinks and have all been online a long time, you probably want to select a different keyword. If not, you have probably found a good keyword. Select 3 – 5 good long-tail (very specific) phrases to use in your marketing.

2. On page optimization

The most important things for on-page optimization are your title and your Meta description tags, which are found in the section of the HTML for your page. You need a good, keyword rich title and description, and the keyword that you want to rank most for should be first in both cases. The title can be your three main keyword phrases, separated by hyphens or it can use your keywords and still be selling the click-through from the SERPs. Just be sure that you use your most important keyword first.

Use the keywords in the copy for your site, too. Be sure to use them in headlines and sprinkle them throughout the text. Just be sure you’re not trying to put them where they don’t belong. Keep your tone natural, but try to use the keywords early as the prominence of your keywords is an important factor.

3. Off page optimization

Links are still important to SEO, and you should get as many backlinks to your website as possible. Join quality directories, like DMOZ.org, the Yahoo directory, and JoeAnt.com. Any directory that is edited by humans and not just what Google considers to be a “link farm” will help.

Entries to directories produce one-way links, which are the kind of links that really propel your SEO. Also get links back from your blog, article directories, other websites, blog commenting, press releases, and the Web 2.0 social sites like Twitter and YouTube. All of the one-way links pointing back will provide a “vote” for your site. The more votes you have, the higher your ranking will become.