One ranking rule is how long your website has been online, or first crawled and you can't speed up that process much. Get it "pinged" as soon as possible and as often as possible with the "right keywords" for attracting targetted customers. Actively manage the keywords, trying better ones when you find them. (Another reason to be your own webmaster!)

Also, expect it to take some time before your website will rank high enough to be found with your keywords. Try them yourself often and use the Alexa toolbar to display your Overture (Yahoo) ranking.

Patience is needed, but start studying your website's visitor statistics and Alexa ranking and make sure you see it rapidly increasing. Good webmasters will continually "test" and improve the website's ROI (return on investment). This means it is "making money" or In Profit. The common goal is to make it profit by .02 or 2 percent over what you spend for any PPC or marketing campaign costs.

Keeping what you spend low and having good results is obviously your goal. This ties your traffic and conversion metrics, means your website is professional and "sells well". The higher percentage the better, of course, and that is the key to "reaching targetted customers". Ultimately your goal is to have someone who is looking for your information and finds it and likes it enough to buy from your website.

Keywords are the "Key" in SEO

Now I ask you to put yourself in the shoes of your potential customer. Think about the keyword phrases they would type into Google to find your website. Usually a single word is not specific enough, and often returns too many results for you to find the exact information you'd be looking for. You would think of and enter a more specific phrase. So "golf swing" might become "improve golf swing" or "natural golf swing".

Finding the BEST Keyword Phrase is the KEY to Reach the Right Customers

This is the tricky part. Which keyword phrases do you want to use over and over again in your website to get the traffic interested in buying your products?

By the way, keywords are also used to obtain the right traffic for your PPC or Pay Per Click Google AdWords or other PPC advertising campaigns.

Today there are several good keyword tools and more seem to be released all the time. They aren't too hard to figure out what they do. They look through the popular search databases themselves and find the number of instances when similar keyword phrases were entered over a certain time period. From the results list you can select the keyword phrases that best meets your product or the needs of the person "googling" for a product like yours, or information that you have on your website.

The trick will be in selecting the right keyword phrases to bring your webpage link high on the list of displayed results. So, overused keywords will probably give you so much competition that you won't get displayed on the first few pages of results, and probable won't be seen. Notice there are ususally several hundred thousand links displayed in the list from the search engine. To be "seen" you need to rank high on that list.

I have more information about finding keywords in Traffic and Traffic Tricks, including more tools you can use to find good keywords.

Make Search Engines Happy

The next trick, or strategy as a webmaster, is to use the ranking rules of the search engine crawler and ranking programs. And, they change all the time. That's right.

What works one day may not work on another day. At least Google seems to have enough information on what their ranking rules are that a good webmaster can make adjustments.

It's not as hard as you might think. Really all they do is get more careful creating rules that will reduce "cheating" by the tricky webmasters.

For instance, keyword stuffing was once quite popular, and now is being punished by Google. All of a sudden some webmasters found that their previously highly ranked websites were no longer showing up on the top pages for their keywords. That is because the rules of ranking were changed.

Actually, your best bet is to be "natural". Tricks might be considered "cheating" and what the spiders are doing is actually looking for the best information online. The algorithms used by them will change over time to punish "cheaters". So, just write natural content about your niche and be careful not to overuse any particular phrase, but use it enough so that the search engines know what your content is all about.