I realize that the title of my article might strike some as a bit pompous – but the fact is the top three things are what matters in most aspect of life, after that things are a bit more muddled and opinion rules the day.

So my top three SEO things to pay attention to are:

• The Top 3 SEO Methods:
• The Top 3 SEO Tags:
• The Top 3 SEO Mistakes:

TAGS! – You have to know which ones matter…

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There are three tags that matter the most within the HTML of your pages if you want to achieve high ranking in the search engines. The top 3 tags for SEO are, in order, The Title Tag, The Header Tags, and the Meta Data tags.

The first big mistake is to not pay attention to these tags! You absolutely need a title for each and every page within your site and that title better be relevant to your key-phrases without you stuffing phrases in a spam like way. For example, if the name of your page is about “Medicated Dog Shampoo” then having a title like this:

Medicated Dog Shampoo, Dog Cleaning Supply, Best Dog Shampooing Method”

…would be good, but having a title that has every possible key-phrase would end up getting you penalized and dilutes the power of each key-phrase.

Another big mistake is that people who search for things use the simple names of things. You need to use the simple names of things as your keywords. People will search for “medicated shampoo for dogs”, but will not search for “Fancy Pants Dog Shampooing Company”. Make sure you use the former as keywords and not the latter. Yes, you company may be called “Fancy Pants” but if what you do is make shampoo for dogs – say just that.

Header Tags are the larger, bold heading for various parts of your pages. They set the sections of pages apart and they also tell the search engines some things about your pages. Pages with lots of header tags and more than one H1 tag usually indicate spammy, direct marketing ads and are treated as such by some of the more sophisticated search engines. On the other hand it is a big mistake to use CSS and not include any header tags – you should have one H1, and a few of the lower level tags scattered about your post. You should try to use your most important keywords in those headers.

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Do not disregard the importance of your meta tags!!! This goes doubly so for the Meta description. Many so-called SEO experts will tell you that the meta description tag is unimportant for SEO results because search engines do not use that tag. That is partially true – this tag will not increase your SEO results at all. Why is it important? Because when your listing does show up, that is the sentence they see in the results page! If you have disregarded it or put stupid stuff in it, no one is going to click your link even if it is in the first position – what a waste if you worked hard to get to that position!

Finally, you have to have a quality site that makes it “stupid-simple” to navigate and understand, why? Because there are so many other choices out there that a potential customer will simply click away if there is anything that makes your site hard to use or understand. Quality and Simplicity… do not underestimate them in SEO.

One More Little Trick:

This last little trick will help you in your SEO ranking efforts. Search engines are getting more and more sophisticated especially in the are of images. Because search is still text based for the most part, the search engines are paying more attention to the alt and title fields that make up the image tag (the one that says “img”). You can get great top level results when someone does an image search by making sure you put keywords into your alt tags, and even your title tags if it makes sense for them.

SEO Software is a good way of automating this process across many sites and also allows you to make your SEO program dynamic, which search engines love. As long as your content is high-quality, the engines will reward you with good ranking – never forget that the goal of search engines is to give real human people the results they are looking for – if they don’t, the people will stop using those engines. If you set up your sites with this in mind you will succeed.

SEO is not rocket science, however there are many things you can do to impact the rankings your site will get. The bottom line is to understand the most important things…the top 3, and then produce clean, simple, high-quality content. Then you are sure to rank at the top of your game.

Want to know The Top 3 SEO products? Go to http://www.TheTop3.net/SEO