1. Focus your page: Each page should focus on one keyword or key phrase. Your keyword should appear in the title, the heading tag and one in bold on the page. You can bold one other closely related keyword or phrase, but do not overdo it. Check the keyword density of the page. There are plenty of free online tools to check the keyword density. It should be between 5% and 15%. If the density is higher than that then you run the risk of being penalized by the search engines.

2. Choose the proper title tag: Your title tag is the first thing a search engine spider sees, so it is on of the most important SEO tools you have. You title should consist of only 1 thing - the keyword of your page. The title tag is the text that will appear in the title bar of the web browser when someone is visiting your page. Take a look at the title of this page.

3. Design your site for your visitors AND search engines: Many experts advise designing your site for your visitors and not worrying about the search engines as much. However, with today's tools, it is very easy to design a site that both your visitors and search engines will like. Make sure to use ALT tags for all of your images. Avoid the use of frames, flash and javascript. Have someone other than your mother or your spouse give you an objective opinion about your site. Is it is pleasing to look at? Is it easy to navigate? Would they come back?

4. Use unique content: Search engines like unique content. Do not fill your website with articles like this that you found on a free article site. It is fine to use some of them, but you must have content that is not found anywhere else on the web. Ideally, all of the content on your main page should be unique as this is the first page the search engine will come across. But if you want some individual pages indexed for a particular keyword, then at least the top content of the page should be unique.

5. Use backlinks effectively: A backlink is when another website links to your site. There are many ways to obtain backlinks (which is a topic for another article) but once you have the opportunity for a backlink, you should use it wisely. Make sure that your keyword is in the text of the link. For example, if the link text is "click here" the link will not carry as much weight with a search engine as the link text "Cookie Recipes" will - assuming the linked page is about cookies recipes.