Winning SEO takes active actions.   Do not just sit back and wish for better.   Make your own SEO success.

The metadata (keywords, description) are often unused.   If your SEO success depends on these...

You Lose

If is common for us to hear something like "I never get found in searches for bananas" yet when we look at the page they hope would be found there is not a single mention of bananas.  

The words must be present to win

Google and such return pages, not sites. Describing your Fremont store on one page and heal pain on another page causes you to be nowhere for "Fremont heal pain" because there is no single page with both.

You need the words and phrases important to SEO to stand out.  One approach is to repeat the phrase.  If you repeat the phrase it seems more important than an incidental phrase. But you cannot just repeat the phrase mindlessly, it is best if you repeat the phrase in a natural manner.  When you repeat the phrase the seach engines might conclude that that phrase you repeated is important on that page.   This paragraph is an example of a condensed use of repeating the phrase. Need I repeat the phrase further?

Any rationalization you may give yourself such as "the search engines will know that XXX really means the same as YYY" or "it is obvious that", or "in this context ..." can be simplified rather accurately and succinctly:

You Lose

They don't, they won't, and you had better not count on it.

Make it simple for them and they may be nice to you ... maybe.

Changes you make, even the successful ones, can take 6 weeks or more before having an impact.

TBD

Things that count big for SEO:

• Domain name: Fremont-gardener.com is great for a search for Fremont gardener, lousy for Newark Landscaping.
   
• Page Title: The page <title> counts a lot</title>
   
• Terms in links: http://fremont-gardener.com?section=prune-shrub would be a great bump for fremont gardener prune shrub.

Humans prefer longwordsstucktogether.com, but you are asking alot of search engines.   They may well interpret
   freemonthypnotherapist
as
   Free mont the rapist
or
   Free month not her pis
whereas
   fremont-hypnotherapist is hard to misinterpret.

The more you ask the search engines to figure out the more likely you are to be disappointed. KISS the engines -- Keep It Simple -- for the search engines.

Underbars are not as good as hyphens.  It is official that google considers underbars to be word glue, not word separators.

tbd

Humans like direct and perhaps intriguing message. Think of IBM's "Think".    Search engines need it spelled out, really really spelled out, said multiple times in many ways so that when you really really spell it out and say it many ways there is a chance that in the many ways you spell it out that the many spelling outs might get the search engines conclusion that you might perhaps be talking about the thing you spelled out so clearly in so many places.  

Need I spell it out further?

Consider 2 URLs:

section=All-about-apples

section=About-apples-oranges-bananas-fast-cars-good-health-world-peace

Now ask "If I were finding sites that were about apples, which is most relevant? Who really talks about apples?"

One URL is focused and more likely to win that question, and that question is part of what search engines are doing when filtering the results.

Ask for more => you get less.

• Decide what term you want to win, Not 500 terms, not 200, not 50, maybe 10, but even then evaluate them just one at a time.
   
• Take one of these. Lets say “NYC Hypnotherapist”.
   
• Ask yourself: How many times is this on my home page? Is it there as a term or in scattered pieces. Is this enough to persuade Google that this page is really full of content relevant to “NYC Hypnotherapist”? Only look at one page when you ask these questions, not the entire site, as google returns pages, not sites. (The answer in this case is “2 references, one of them scattered. Google will think that these are incidental references and that this page is really not a relevant search result for a search for “NYC Hypnotherapist”. It will show, maybe on page 30 or 60, only after the many other pages that are more relevant.)
   
• Relevancy is the first step. If the page is not relevant it will not be found, no matter what else you may do SEO wise.

All of these tips are sometimes wrong. SEO is a matter of probability, not certainty.   The rules are constantly changing.

Start with on site SEO.  You must have something reasonably attractive to the search engines before you try to draw attention to it. Otherwise you are just investing your effort in order to get many big "Ewww...a skunk!" reactions.

TBD Offsite work

TBD -- discuss spammy ones, and discuss HotDoodle link pook