by Steve Phillips

Created on: October 12, 2007   Last Updated: April 30, 2011

The famous movie quote "if you build it, they will come" only applies to baseball stadiums - not websites.

If your website is not attracting the kind of crowds as a new baseball stadium, then you'll need to take it to the next level by optimizing your site and moving up in search engine rankings. The entire process of getting ranked higher in search engines is referred to as "search engine optimization" (SEO).

Consider:  Business owners cherish the day when their website is ranked somewhere among the top 10 in Google (and/or other search engines). Who says it can't be your website? The Internet is a level-playing field; any company, regardless of size, can rank high in the search engines.  Search engine placement and keyword-related advertising can make 80 to 90 percent of your traffic. Think about it. If you are ranked higher in Google, it makes sense your site will see more visitors.

If customers can't find your site, then they can't learn about your products and services; place orders; subscribe to a newsletter, or buy from you. You're losing sales when willing customers can't find you.

SEO rules have changed over the years. Previously, website developers would place keywords in their site's hyper-text markup language (HTML) Meta Tag section. Then, search engine "spiders" or "crawlers" would find the Meta Tags and index the site within their database.

But developers quickly learned they could cheat the system and outsmart search engines by placing high-traffic keywords in their site's HTML - even if the keywords had nothing to do with their site's content. Now, search engines pay more attention to the site's content than ever before and almost totally ignore Meta Tag keywords. Meta Tags just aren't reliable for search engine optimization they're the dinosaur of web marketing.

Although you can pay to have your advertisement listed within Google's Sponsored Links and Adwords sections, you must work your way into the Top 10 by fully optimizing your website for both search engines and visitors.

By following these 10 steps, you will be well on your way to seeing some major improvements within your search engine rankings:

1. Concentrate on content and keywords.

Let's say you are selling gift baskets. A Google search for the keyword "gift baskets" returns over 21 million hits. However, if you rewrite your site's content and focus more on the types of gift baskets you are selling, then you'll see some success. For example, "thank you gift baskets"

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