We will begin get something straight from

We will begin get something straight from the outset - this article probably seo won't get you to number one if you have a highly competitive search term. If you're seeking to get to the top of the shop for a search expression that is used 5, 000 times each day and is dominated by massive firms then you're going to have to work

. But this guide will show you how you can begin to make a difference and very quickly alter your positions for the better.

With that out the way, we can get right down to the real meat of this and find out precisely what an optimised site is because this is just what appears to be the big issue when getting started. I'm going to split it down into chunks so you can get this right from the beginning.

The particular 'title' is the bit that goes right up the top of the page, usually inside the blue bar in Internet Explorer, Firefox etc. and it's the first thing that people find when your listing appears in Google. They have therefore surely the most important thing to get appropriate and many people make a big blunder here - they put "Welcome to our website" some other bland introduction.

At this moment, it's nice to welcome people, sure, but people see it as a given that if you're got a website you will want to welcome people to it. There's a very good reason

to use this area designed for such inane text - Yahoo takes this as the most important aspect on the content of the page. Therefore you should be putting your keywords in there.

My personal much-loved way of doing this is to put a couple of keywords, a vertical bar, then some related keywords. For example:

Blue widgets | Widgets | Car icons

Job done.

This is the bit that will visitors don't see on your web-site, but they will see in the Google record and it's very important for 'hooking' your website visitors in. Similar to a network meeting, you need to really be looking to put your 'elevator pitch' here. Don't stuff that full of keywords because that looks terrible, instead put the sort of product sales copy that you would expect in a leaflet or brochure and get them to simply click that link.

You might need to talk to your on line designer for this one but the 'H1' tag is one of the most important on-site components that people will see. I'm often requested if it should be identical to the 'title' tag above but clearly that would be ridiculous! You H1 should be a going to the rest of your page and not simply a keyword and key phrase stuffed nonsensical sentence. Yes, include your keywords but make it sensible.

OKAY, the meat of the page -- the article and what it should talk about. This is certainly easy, it should be human-readable and practical in its content. Trying to stuff lots of keywords in will look very unusual indeed and may put people down. There's some evidence to suggest Google also ignores keyword denseness and so including your keywords at all could possibly be utterly pointless. No, write this with a view to selling your item to people who may want to buy that - don't be going crazy with a lot of keywords that just look abnormal.

What's more, you should never try to cram a lot content onto one page all at once. Google doesn't like to be mixed up and a page that talks about auto widgets as well as truck and motorboat widgets will just be confusing into it and to people.

Think 'niche' when you're writing your content and position it on the page, do just about every product and category on a separate page (easy with a good content managing system) and create all your tags in the above list with this in mind.

Google doesn't just call at your traditional home page as the 'home page', it will in fact choose the most relevant page out of all your site and give people to that one.

To be honest, if you get those simple things correct from the beginning then you'll probably do very well indeed in the rankings and I have known sites reach the heady heights of top three by doing this alone, but in all honesty you'll probably need to do some link building as well, and we'll enter into that in another article.