Now, the bad part here is that SEO has gotten a bad name and so-called experts sell the equivalent of snake-oil to their customers. Many times these snake-oil pros offer great ideas such as text that users can’t see but Google can or loading your pages with keyword terms – both of which are considered “black-hat” tactics are are actually frowned upon by the Googles and Bings of the world.

So, how to gain access to the all-important first page of Google? It’s actually easy if you follow these simple rules known as “white-hat” strategies.

Steps to SEO Success

Step 1 - Keywords:

You know your customers and the questions they ask you using common terms and maybe not so common terms. Odds are, they’re probably searching Google for the same or similar terms. Come up with a list of 50-75 of the most relevant words and use Google’s free Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) to refine your list.

Step 2 - Alignment:

After you have a great list of keywords that are both searched a lot and a few that only get a few searches a month, align your current website pages to each of the keywords.

So, as an example, you may align your bowling alley homepage to the term “State College, PA Rainy Day Activities”.

Step 3 - Page Titles:

Page Titles – Once your keywords are aligned with individual pages of your site, edit the page titles of your articles to match your preferred keywords. Your page title can be edited in different ways for different content management systems or hand-coding, but generally you can view your current page title by opening a browser and looking at the text in your browser tab.

Here’s an example of a page title for the same bowling alley – “State College, PA Rainy Day Activities – Bowling Leagues – Joe’s Bowling Alley."

Step 4 - Body Text:

Make sure you utilize <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc tags when posting content to your website. That means the main text title on your webpage should have a <h1> html wrapping it. Then, sectioning the next level would have <h2> tags be their title with <p> tags used for paragraphs and so on.

Here’s an example in html form:

<h1>All about Chocolate</h1>
<p>General paragraph introducing the page</p>
<h2>White Chocolate</h2>
<p>general text about white chocolate</p>
<h3>White Chocolate Cookies</h3>
<p>General text about white chocolate cookies</p>
<h2>Dark Chocolate</h2>
<p>General text about dark chocolate</p>

and so on…

Step 5 - Meta Page Descriptions:

Make sure page descriptions briefly describe what your page is about. This like the page title is handled differently in different content management systems. If you can’t find where to change, do a quick Google search for your CMS and there are likely to be many tutorials. Regardless, updating your page description means that you are telling Google and the world what your page is about as this is the brief text under the Titled hyperlink in a Google search. So, make it brief and relevant.

Example for the bowling alley homepage – Bowling alley in State College, Pennsylvania offering leagues, midnight specials and great food and beer.

Sure there are a number of additional tips to follow up on the above, but this should get you started for now. We’ll follow up with more blog posts to fully search engine optimize your website.