The secret is that there is no secret. It takes knowledge and hard work.  Anyone who knows how to optimize a website so it ranks highly in the search results pages knows this.  There are no secrets or shortcuts that can be taken to get high rankings.

Many people think it’s as simple as stuffing keywords on a page or making text invisible or in a very small illegible font.  These techniques can get your website banned from the Google search results entirely.  In case you didn’t realize it the Google engineers are smart and they have already thought of these things and added special counter measures to their algorithm.

Some people think buying multiple domains with keywords in them like bostonpainters.com, bostonexteriorpainting.com, bostoninteriorpainters.com and having them mirror or redirect to the actual website will work.  The reason why mirror sites don’t work is because the Google technology is so powerful that it can immediately detect that a web page already exists on another domain.  Google will only index the content once and duplicate content will be relegated to the supplemental index and will never show up in the search results.

Another technique people try is to create special landing pages intended to fool the search engines.  They stuff keywords on the pages or sometimes use mostly the same text with only a few words substituted like town names.  When Google crawls these pages they can tell that the content is garbage and mostly duplicated elsewhere.  Google is pretty smart at determining whether a website has useful information or not. With Google’s latest algorithm rewrite named “Hummingbird”, it’s more important than ever to have unique and useful content on your website.

So how do you optimize a website?  It really all depends…I look at each website on a case by case basis.  I will find the niche keywords and determine how much competition they’re already is for those keywords.  Then I come up with a strategy to increase the targeted traffic to the website.  Targeted traffic is website traffic that will result in conversions.  For example, a company that provides mold testing for home owners in Boston, Massachusetts will want to rank highly for keywords like “Mold Testing in Boston”, “Boston Mold Testing”, “Mold Testing in Massachusetts”, etc.  (Keyword research is another in depth topic that will be discussed in a future article).  Targeted traffic for this company will be website traffic coming from Google where people type in these niche keywords.

Search Engine Optimization is a very detailed and advanced process.  My best advice is to hire a professional who understands the process thoroughly and has a proven track records at increasing targeted website traffic.

That being said here are a few things you should keep in mind.

• Make sure your website uses error free semantic HTML.  Ask your website designer if he is capable of doing this and if he looks at you like a deer in headlights run the other way.
• Make sure you include a unique HTML Title tag on each page that is related to the content on that page.
• Make sure you have a unique META description tag on each page of your website.  If you don’t know what this means contact a professional web designer/developer who does.
• Include individual pages on your website for the various services your business provides instead of lumping everything onto one page.  It’s only possible to optimize a web page for 1 or 2 keywords so it’s important that you have separate pages for all of your niche keywords.
• Make an investment in your website.  You will only get what you put into it.  In order to get a “return on your investment” you must make an investment.

These are the basic building blocks of SEO.  These are steps that every web designer/developer should take when creating a website regardless of their SEO experience.   If you’ve accomplished the above then it should be possible to continue with more advanced SEO techniques to get your website ranking high for the keywords related to your business so you can get the best ROI (return on investment) from your website.

Without a properly developed website in can be impossible to increase targeted traffic to a website.  Take your time and do it right otherwise you will end up spending more in the long run.  And remember there are no secrets other than finding someone who knows what they are doing…