Nearly 80% of all transactions begin with a search engine query. Having a search engine friendly Website is an absolute must in today's competitive marketplace. In fact author and professional blogger Dave Taylor says if your customers can't find you in Google your business is already dead.



The truth is there are plenty of other good ways to promote your Web presence. But building a search engine friendly site is so easy; it just makes good sense to do it.

There are numerous things you can do to optimize your files and pages for the search engines. But this article will focus on three very easy steps that you should incorporate into every Web page you build from here forward.

-- Step One: Your Title Tag

When it comes to onsite SEO, the most important tag in any HTML document is the title tag. This tag is essentially your first impression on the spiders and bots the search engines send to crawl and index your pages.

How many times have you landed on a page and seen something like ?index? or ?home? in your browser tab. This is a horrible title strategy, unless you want to build rank for the word index!

It's incredible how many people just leave the default title tag in place. It takes less than 60 seconds to change this tag to a good keyword phrase, and doing so will improve your chances of being ranked well by a factor of ten or greater.

Your title tag needs to reflect one to three of your primary keyword phrases. When using multiple phrases, you can separate them using the pipe ( | ) character.

For example, one of my sites sells a great course on Website design. And since I want to keep getting traffic from the search engines, my title tag looks like this:

Learn Web Design | Website Creation | Learn HTML

My ongoing keyword research tells me these terms get lots of traffic, but are not impossibly competitive. As a general rule, the keywords you choose for your pages should follow the same ideal; popular but not absolutely saturated.

You should also be aware that your title is the headline that is displayed when your site comes up in the search results. A relevant title is more likely to get a click than a heading that makes no sense or reads ?index?.

And be sure to give each page on your site an appropriate title. Don't just slap the same title tags into the top of every file unless you want to miss out on some great opportunities to pull traffic to all of your pages with different keywords.

-- Step Two:

Use a strong H1 tag at the top of every page. Search engine bots will recognize anything you put in these primary headings as an important phrase.

By placing a keyword rich headline at the top of every page using the H1 tags, you will be feeding the search algorithms exactly the kind of solid relevance they are looking for. Many of your competitors will underestimate the value of doing this on every page, so you'll have the edge when you put this tactic to use.

-- Step Three:

Use the META description tag to improve your ranking and click through rates. There is always some debate going on in the SEO community as to whether or not META tags are still relevant.

They are! Don't let anyone tell you otherwise; I've seen my pages ranked over the competition solely on the strength of keywords placed in my META description tag!

What you need to do is create a good, compelling description of one to three sentences, and be sure to include a couple of your primary keywords. The search bots will acknowledge this, and even more interestingly the META description is the summary text that shows up underneath your title when your site appears on the results pages.

Think of this like a classified ad, because that's essentially what it is. Searchers will look at your description and decide whether or not your site has the info they are trying to find.

The majority of marketers neglect this tactic, so you can be well ahead of the curve by putting it to work for you.

There is a lot more to SEO than these three steps, but if you execute everything in this article every time you build a Web page you'll be off to a great start.