Everyone in direct sales that has a replicated website must have a capture page for differentiation purposes. Whether you're in real estate, insurance, network marketing, or any other direct selling field, you probably know the importance of branding yourself to keep yourself apart from others. It's also a great tool to build a prospecting list. Here's how to use simple search engine optimization to get your landing page to the top of Google, Yahoo, MSN, or any of the others.

I should first apologize to those more advanced web page designers and internet marketers that have gotten into this article accidently from my slick headline. This article is about basic webpage optimization. I will hope for your forgiveness also for this second transgression: I'm showing newbies just how easy it is to build a webpage for practically any product, service, or other endeavor. This means you can't charge them thousands of dollars anymore unless they are just completely overwhelmed in the time schedules.

In general, the major search engines function in the same way. This is what they're looking for in order to identify the theme of the web page:

URL: The URL is the web address of a web page. What can help is to include relevent keywords in the URL for the page, so work with your webmaster (if you still have one after reading this) to create static URLs with keywords included. Don't try to have 10 different keywords in a URL, though.

Page Title: The page title is the text that appears in the blue bar at the top of your browser. A search engine uses the page title (also called the title tag) to identify pages and show users the relevance of the page. The page title also shows up as the link when a search result is returned. Keep title tags short and precise, between 8-9 words. Every page should have a unique and relevant page title.

Metadata: It should no longer be a secret that meta tags aren't as important as they used to be. But including your main keywords in your page metadata can help Google differentiate between different pages. Make sure your metadata is specific to each individual page and that it doesn't include any words that are not related to the text of that page.

Text: The content of the page should be relevant to the topic mentioned in your title tag, metadata and URL. Make sure you mention your keywords as well as other words that relate to the basic theme of the page. The main idea is to have each page stay in its own theme.

Lots of people focus on things like keyword density (the number of times the keyword is mentioned) and keyword patterns (where the keyword is found, like in the first paragraph, first sentence, last sentence, etc.). Google's algorithms are constantly getting smarter, and in my opinion, your best strategy (especially for the long term) is to write your content with the user in mind. If you write specifically for your site visitors, you're creating exactly what the search engines are looking for.

Think of it this way: Being number one in the search rankings is important, but if you're number two and you've optimized your content for the user, you'll probably get more repeat visitors and sales than if you create pages focusing exclusively on getting better search rankings. Your visitors see what you're doing fairly easily.

If you currently operate a website, your webmaster can help you with each of the items above.

If you're developing a new site, be sure your site is set up properly from the beginning, or from the ground up. Make sure you can create title tags for each page, name each page with a separate URL, and include page specific metadata. The last thing you'll want to do is to go back later and correct any basic site structure problems that you could have done right the first time (That last sentence should not be restricted to SEO, but applied to other areas of life and work!).If all this just seems like too much work, here's a great service that does most of the work for you without costing you an arm and a leg. www.iwantwebpages.com

Copyright (c) 2008 Dan Dimit