1. Use Keyword Rich Descriptive Title Tags

Title tags are one of the most important factors on your website for optimizing for your niche keywords. Some guidelines for title tags are: Use your organizations name; use descriptive keywords such as “Northern Illinois SEO;” use 10-12 words per title tag; use a different title tag on each page based on what keywords on that page you are optimizing for. Don’t use comma separated words with spaces. Instead use pipes and spaces to separate keywords or phrases. A pipe looks like this | on your keyboard. It is the key above the return key.

2. Research your keyword phrases extensively.

The phrases you think your target market is searching for might be wrong. I’m amused how often people get excited about getting ranked high for a certain term when they should be looking at the volume of searches that particular term gets. To find perfect keyword phrases, use research tools such as KeywordDiscovery, Wordtracker or Google’s Keyword Tool. Then, use Excel or a similar program to compile lists of the most relevant phrases for your site, and optimize for only a couple of keywords per page. Be sure to avoid general keywords such as “dentist” or “lawyer,” they are very competitive. Instead, use keywords like “Dallas Lawyer,” “Texas Dentist,” or better yet “Dallas, Texas Suburb Dentist.” Try to work in keywords 3 or more times per page without making the copy sound ridiculous.

3. Size up the competition

Your competitors are the organizations that rank well for the keywords you want to rank well for. Knowing what makes them competitive can give you a great edge. Search for you competitors using your researched keywords and determine the following:

• Competitor rank in the Search Engines
• Number of incoming links
• What keywords are in the title of linking page
• Percentage of links containing keywords in the link text
• The Google PageRank of linking pages

There are some great tools for analyzing competitors. For instance, there are two Firefox plugins that give detailed stats on sites you visit. One such plugin is SEOBook toolbar, and the other is the SEO Quake toolbar. Another great tool for comparative analysis of websites is Compete.com. Once you have determined the factors that make your competitors excel us those same strategies on your sites. i.e. Sites that link to your competition may be a great place to start when building links to your site.

4. Optimize your Meta Tags

META tags are code within the head section of your website that are only read by search engine spiders (and geeks that like to look at HTML code, lol). Meta tags summarize what your site is about, and despite their diminishing role, they still play an important part in your SEO strategy. The description Meta tag is the text that is displayed under your title on the search results page. This is a key place to summarize what your site offers to your prospective visitor so that they will click on your site instead of your competitors.

The description meta tag looks like this:
<meta name=”description” content=”concise statement of your mission” />

The second important meta tag is the keywords meta tag. Despite its fading importance to Google, it is still looked at by other search engines, such as Bing or Yahoo.

The keyword meta tag looks like this:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”lawyer, dallas, texas, flower mound, legal, attorney” />

5. Use Heading Tags

Heading tags are a very important element to consider when writing your site copy. Heading are great from a usability standpoint as well as SEO. Using heading tags helps users, web browsers and search engines determine what the important parts of your page are.

Your main page title should always use the <h1> tag — this tells what your page is about. Use of additional tags, such as <h2> and <h3> is also important because they help to break down your page. The search engines spiders will automatically know what your page topics are by looking at these tags.

6. Use ALT Tags on all your images

Images are a great way to communicate the topic of a page unfortunately search engines can read images. Enter ALT tags – they help the search engine determine the topic of a picture. This is important because the more relevant text on your page, the better chance you have of achieving higher search engine rankings.

7. Submit XML Sitemaps to Google and Yahoo

Google and Yahoo have created programs just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible. Google’s version is called Google Sitemaps and Yahoo’s program is called Site Explorer. Simply by placing a formatted xml file with site map on your webserver, you enable Search Engine crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly. Just create an account at both sites then visit http://www.xml-sitemaps.com and have it crawl your site, download the resulting files and put them onto your main folder of your website and tell Google and Yahoo where to find them. You’ll be surprised how fast even new domains can be indexed following this method.

8. Build Links in your Niche

Search engines especially Google determines your sites Page Rank by several factors including: how many sites link to you, the topic of those sites and the authority of those sites. So don’t just go out and try to get links from everybody because off topic or non-authority sites will not significantly increase your Page Rank. However there are many reputable sites in your niche that you can use to submit your web site to for inclusion.

Here are some examples:

• Niche Directories
• Niche Blog
• Your Current Vendor Sites
• Geographic Directories i.e. Google, Yahoo, and Bing Local
• Large Directories such as Yahoo and DMOZ.org

9. Become an Authority in Your Niche

Don’t be afraid to share a little of the secret sauce in your sites blog, or articles. That may sound counter intuitive but in this day and age people and people are skeptical, and want to know if your an authority. With great relevant content  you’ll be able to generate links from other web sites and blogs and people and search engines will see you as an authority. Also consider contributing to trade periodicals, and niche blogs which can also earn you links on their sites.

10. Use Social Networks

Social Media is such a major factor in building links, buzz, and relationships, and shouldn’t be ignored. Social media includes sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon. Social Networking takes a little time to build relationships, but is rewarding as you get to interact with customers, answer questions, and build traffic, and links from niche sites. As you build friends and followers you will increase customer loyalty, and they will become your online marketers.