Here's a real simplified description of how to SEO your site!

Page Titles: You want to maximize both the real estate allowed by search engines (64 characters), so if your titles are too short, re-write them; if they are too long, revise them so search engines don't cut them short. Secondly, think of your page titles as the headline for an advertisement: get people excited about your site, include your phone number or special offer -- something to encourage people to click on your listing.

Page Descriptions: Like Titles, you want to use all 150 characters the search engines display -- really no more, no less. This gives you an opportunity to hype your site, promote special offers and compel people to click on your listing. Search engines promote your site for free... so you want to make the most of it... and increase the number of times people click on your listing rather than others.

Keywords: The importance of keywords is hotly debated. But the bottom line is that they should serve as a guideline for you to talk about the most important topics for each page. They're like bullet points or talking points you want to get across to your audience. If you list certain keywords on your page, but then don't actually mention them, you may not be getting the right points across to your web visitors.

As an example, let's say you sell canoes. Your home page does a pretty good job staying on target, but on your page about paddles, you've listed a bunch of keywords for the page, but don't actually appear anywhere on the paddles page:

• canoes and paddles
• canoe paddle size
• canoe paddle sizing
• canoe paddles on sale
• canoe paddles sizing
• oars and paddles
• paddles for canoes
• sizing canoe paddles

So, you should consider writing more content to discuss these topics, or create more pages where these topics could be discussed in more detail if you don't feel that there's room on the main paddles page.

If someone was searching on sizing canoe paddles, and then got to your site, there really isn't any information for them, and they're likely to go elsewhere. Worse, Google is not going to index your page for sizing canoe paddles, because you don't mention it at all... and your competitor's pages that do discuss this topic are the ones Google is going to display when it returns search results.

Content: Probably the most important thing here is to make sure that you have titles or alt text for all of your images and hyperlinks. This creates a better user experience, assists users with disabilities, and provides another opportunity to feature the most important keywords for that page. Some of the images have titles, but most of them don't, so there's a great opportunity to optimize pages this way.

Social Media: Use Twitter and Facebook as much as possible. Twitter is like an Internet radio station broadcasting your message each time you Tweet. It's free, and doesn't really require any maintenance, so I say Tweet away -- as often as possible (there are tools for automating this, as well). Facebook requires a bit more work -- creating better content, and monitoring any responses. But Facebook provides great opportunities to increase your social circles. These Tweets and Posts end up on search engines, too, so make sure you are talking about all the aspects of your business (canoes, paddles, accessories, etc.), and promote these pages as well as your home page. My biggest recommendation would be to start using YouTube. Take videos on your next trip and post them. Get customers to submit videos of their trips using your gear. Create tutorials on how to correctly size a canoe paddle...

Search: Look at your top keywords and see where you can make improvements. For example, if you don't show up on the first three pages of any search engine for "canoeing" find a way to rank for that keyword, particularly if you're ranking well for some other, similar terms. You may want to re-write some of you pages to include the work "canoeing", write articles about canoeing, use the word canoeing when you fill in titles and alt tags for images and hyperlinks, name your YouTube videos "Canoeing... ", even add special pages to your site that are just about canoeing!

Site: Your page load speed (and this is straight from Google) is a very important factor for search engines. If there are 10 sites on canoeing, and your loads the slowest... Google is going to favor one that loads more quickly. Perhaps you have images that are too large, or there other factors that prevent your pages from loading quickly.

If none of this makes sense to you, it will to the folks who built your web site. You can simply run the reports, print them out, and hand them over to your web developer/programmer/designer and say: here's a list of things that can be improved upon -- and they will have a much better understanding of how to actually make all of these changes.

Then, once those changes have been made, you can re-run the reports (making sure to check the "Refresh" box, and watch all of those red entries disappear. Once all, or at least most, of the red line items are gone, you can feel confident that your pages are well-optimized.

You'll want to re-run the reports periodically, as things outside of your control will change, to look at Trending Keywords, see what your competition is up to, and see if there are other ways to improve each and every one of your pages over time.

You've got to keep your site tuned up, just like you would a car, lest you find yourself on the side of the road with the hood up... and your competition passing you by.

Rob Decker is a seasoned technology professional with more than 25 years experience and has helped small business and Fortune 500 companies -- in a wide range of markets and industries -- to reach their sales and marketing goals through the use of advertising, marketing and public relations activities designed to generate leads and sales. During the past 25 years, he has consulted with Agilent Technologies, American Express, Corporate Express, Dell, ING, Mobility Electronics, Newsweek, Rand McNally, SPSS, The Stanford University School of Medicine, StorageTek and many others.

To learn more about optimizing your site, visit www.optimize-my-site.com and get a free SEO analysis of your home page.