Now I am no expert, but I want to fill you in on what I have learnt so far about ranking well in Google. We have been trying for that coveted #1 spot for our chosen keywords on Google for ages and now we are just about there. So let me show you what we did and how you can do it to. As a tip - if you run a service which is 'local' then you will need to localize your keywords.

1. Find some keywords that are not too competitive and have a reasonable amount of traffic. For this I have been using the free software at goodkeywords.com. So for example if you were in the fruit selling trade you could choose something like 'fruit' as this has on average 67,000 searches per month on overture (search engine), however the competition is high, with 221,000,000 pages containing that keyword. Although this is not impossible, it would be a mammoth task and would probably take an army of SEO experts to get you to number one. What you could do is go for a less competitive keyword like 'fresh fruit salad recipe' which only has 6,040,000 pages containing that keyword and still has over 1000 searches per month. If you choose say ten of these keywords and optimize them you could soon have 10,000 visits per month.

2. Write content using these keywords on your site using hn tags, bold italic and underline for these keywords. This is not that important, but hey, every little helps - right? Don't forget to use your keywords also in your title and description tags also.

3. Go out and get links coming into your new keyword optimized pages with your keywords in the link text. This is one of the best ways to get inbound links as it also helps to build you a solid and well formed reputation. You can submit articles on a whole range of topics on thousands of article directories all over the internet. For each article that you post you can place at least one inbound link in it that points towards your site. This link can be palace in your 'Author Bio'. Any articles that you submit will want to be 'keyword enriched', which means that it will have to mention several times a term that you think people will use to search for you site. Once you have your article you will need to submit it to some online directories. For this, quantity is just as good as quality. For a better distribution that is done automatically for you I suggest that you use isnare.com

4. Wait for a while - but keep getting links while you are waiting.