In today’s internet world if your site is not optimized you are going to be lost in the shuffle. There are many aspects to search engine optimization (SEO) and I will address a few of them here.

It is important to know also that not all search engines read a web site the same, so not all the rules below apply to all the search engines.

1. pick a domain name that is related to your business subject. For example michigan-hunting.com with a hyphen placed between the words of the url it identifies them as individual words and uses them as keywords.

2. Your title tag needs to be short and to the point. I am going to use http://www.michigan-outdoors.com as an example here. The title tag reads “michigan hunting and fishing” this gets right to the point of the site. A tag such as the official site of the michigan sportsman might be ok but would not key in on michigan hunting and fishing quite so well.

3. keywords: keywords used more than 2 times can be considered spam. In order to encompass your keywords and let the search engine grab them and create multitudes of keyphrases separate each word with a space not a comma. The following is an example of how these keywords can be made into different phrases. Keywords - Michigan hunting fishing sportsman squirrel deer outfitter charter boat lake walleye

Now here are some keyphrases that can be interpreted from these keywords:
deer hunting in Michigan
deer hunting
deer hunting outfitters in Michigan
charter boat fishing
lake fishing
charter fishing

4. Description of your site. Again be keyword specific and get to the point. I always say put yourself in the spot of your client and think of what to write in your description that would entice them to visit.
Examples:

• Site for michigan hunting and fishing (ok)

• Michigan hunting and fishing information with discussion board, fishing reports, hunting tips and techniques, listings for outfitters, fishing guides, resorts and sporting goods shops (better)

5. Next your home page content is very important. You want to have content that describes your site and reinforces your title, keywords and description. repetition is the key!

6. Link popularity - sites such as Yahoo and Google place a lot of ranking on how popular your web site is, how many links to your site is out there.

Web site popularity will be discussed in a separate article.