Are you days filled with anxiety over your search engine placement? Are your nights filled with visions of the evil Google monster sending your visitors to your competition?

Don’t freak out. It’s not as tough–nor as bad–as you think.

Every time I teach a live audience on the topic of search engine optimization, I always get questions about the most obscure things. Most of them are genuinely scared that Google is out there trying to bury their pages at the end of the line.

Many times these people read everything they can on the topic of search. They pick up pieces here and there and try to somehow reconcile them in their minds. Matt Cutts is both their guru and their enemy.

If this describes you, I have just one word: RELAX.

While it is true that Google looks at thousands of characteristics when it decides where to place your web pages in its results, 99.7% of those aren’t going to matter unless you are in a highly competitive niche.

Instead there are just a few things to really concern yourself with. Take care of these few things and you will get to the top 10 for most keyword phrases. Don’t worry about anything else until you take care of these.

Here are the only things you need to concern yourself with:

• Have your target keyword phrase in the title tag of the page (which in WordPress means the title of your post).
• Use your target keyword phrase in the first paragraph and scattered throughout the page, if possible placing it in “headline” tags.
• Make sure to use your categories and tags to link to your post with the exact keyword phrase you wish to target and that your category or tag cloud (or both) appear on every page of your site.
• Get incoming links from other web pages (both on your site and others) using the exact keyword phrase you wish to score highly for in the linking text. If possible find pages to link to yours that are on the same topic.

There are other things you can do to boost your search rankings, but these are the biggies. Work on these and watch your search listings and traffic soar.

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