meta tags, title tags and keyword density. These were the tools of the trade in 1998, but not so

much in 2005. While the title tag is still pretty important, keyword density is more likely to

decrease your rankings that increase them (more on that in a future post) and meta tags have very

little effect on ranking these days.

Most ranking power in today's SEs (especially Google) comes from links and anchor text. Given

that, most people think SEO then becomes all about getting backlinks. Well, backlinks are

important, but you have a wealth of opportunity within you own site to help your ranking as well.

By creating an appropriate navigation structure, you can give yourself an abundance of linking

power with you site alone.

The key (and you'll hear this theme A LOT in my posts) is planning. What is needed is to get

links to all of your most coveted keywords from every page on your site, with your keywords as

the anchor text. Then, you want to get links to each of your secondary keywords from all the

pages within that section.

This requires 2 things:
1. Identify your BEFORE you

design your site's navigation. (That requires some research)
2. Design you navigation to match as closely as you can, the keywords you are targeting.

Once you have your target keywords identified and your navigation set up to point enough links

the correct anchor text at the pages targeting those words, then it is time to focus on

the title tag, meta tags and body copy. Make sure they all support the anchor text in the links

pointing to the given page. Congruency between inbound link anchor text, title tag, meta tags (to

a MUCH lesser degree) body copy (including Hx tags) is the winning formula.

When you follow this strategy, you will find yourself able to target dozens, or even hundreds of

keywords effectively on a relatively small site. Using this strategy, you can get top placement

(page 1 in all 3 major SEs) on moderately without a single external

backlink pointing to most of your pages (You will still need some good external backlinks to

power your site as a whole, but not to most of the pages you'll get ranked). Conversely, with a

poorly designed navigation structure, you may need to get 2, 3 or 4 times the number of backlinks

to have the same effect. As with most things of value in life, a little planning up front pays

huge dividends down the road.

Starting with what you think your prospects are searching for and using the available tools from

Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and/or others, develop an initial keyword list. The list

should include every keyword you think someone interested in your products or services MIGHT type

into Google, Yahoo, MSN or other search engine.

Starting with the keywords in your Initial Keyword list, determine what you believe your

conversion rate will be on clicks you get from those keywords. If you have no idea, begin with

your average conversion rate for your site and adjust up or down based on how targeted you

believe the keyword is. This is just needs to be an educated guess at this point. Soon after you

launch your campaign, you'll have real data to replace your estimates with.