Assuming you know all about SEO, then you will know that in order to stand any chance of success getting your website ranked highly, you will need SEO Strategy and Flopyhat has a number of SEO Solutions. A successful SEO strategy needs research, design and regular monitoring covering the following areas:

Keyword-rich content

It is time to climb into the minds of your potential customers and guess what words and phrases are they typing into Google and other search engines? Try to focus your pages around these keywords and phrases, and place them prominently. Search engines are not stupid though, so do not litter these keywords willy nilly, the page still has to read well.

There are a growing number of tools online that you can use to research keyphrases, and below I have listed a few that Floppyhat regularly turns uses:

• Keyword Selector Tool
• Keyword Discovery
• Wordtracker

Many of these tools show you similar keywords and phrases to the one you are currently researching, and this often leads you down different paths. Choosing a keyword or phrase that has a million hits is not going to serve you well as you will be competing for this keyword with thousands of other sites. Instead, picking one of those less chosen keywords or phrases you may stand to compete for.

As a rule of thumb, you should aim to create a page for each keyword or phrase you decide to target.

So you have your keyword or phrase, you now need the page. Besides the actual page content, search engines will look at a number of other items on your page to determine its worth in relation to the keyword or phrase you are trying to promote:

• Meta tags.
• Page URL.
• Page Headings.
• Inbound link text.

Site and page design

It is not enough just to have a page full of keywords and phrases, you need to arrange this information as efficiently as possible across your site.

Search engines and visitors need to be able to access your keyword-rich content easily, so hiding it several clicks down from the home page is a no no. Everything from the text on the page, to the various other types of media needs to focus search engines and visitors on the content you believe is most important.

The links that bring visitors to a keyword-rich content page, whether they are from external sites or from other pages on your own website are called inbound links. Google's Page Rank (PR) is calculated by looking at the number of inbound links you have, and the PR of those links. Ideally you only want high PR sites linking to you as their high PR will "rub off" on you. Likewise, low PR sites will do you no good at all, and may even harm your own PR.

Should you wish to check your own website's PR, download the Google Toolbar. There are also plenty of websites out there who will offer to explain how PR is calculated in great detail should you be interested, just click the link if you want to know more.

Acquiring Inbound Links

The previous SEO strategies were pretty much solely down to the work you put in, acquiring inboud links to a large extent is out of your hands. That said, with more hard work and some creative thinking, you can get them.

There main ways of acquiring inbound links are:

• Reciprocal links programs, where you swap links with other sites.
• Purchasing inbound links.

Of course the best links are the free ones, where other websites have linked your yours because they consider it to have value. This is also most likely to gain you the higher PR from Google, as they look less favourably on links that were purchased or swapped. Try and get your website noticed by one of the news info media websites and it will be a great start.

To learn more about how Floppyhat can help you with your SEO strategies, please check out SEO Solutions page.