Are you ready for this? Surprise! There is no secret.

Now, before you get upset and try to hang me up by my toes, please let me explain. The big secret is, there is no secret. Of course, there are those who want to perpetuate the illusion of magic surrounding some so-called black hat tactics, but in reality there is no hocus-pocus. Great SEO masters can definitely help you get a higher ranking on most search engines. But these same SEO experts will tell you that the improved ranking is not because of potions or incantations. As I have advised before, if someone is feeding you that line, then save your money and put it back in your pocket.

Search Engines are just sophisticated software programs that use "spiders" to make requests of web pages, very similar to the way that your favorite browser requests pages. But here's the difference. These spiders don't care about the CSS formatting. They only want content, links, and the URL. They are hitting the web pages so quickly that they don't have time for anything else. Most spiders are not interested in your images either, other than the alt tags. (So, here is a tip to possibly improve your SEO ranking. ALWAYS use the alt tags with images.)

Searched for your website lately? How many hits were returned by Google? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?

Well, you are definitely not alone.

So, how do you get your site listed on that first page? Are you paying some SEO guru your hard-earned bucks to get and maintain a high Google ranking? I'm sure that there are some good, no, great, SEO consultants who can produce results. But you should know that Google uses almost 200 different parameters when deciding upon the weight of their results. And the websites that are on the first page today can easily slide from view tomorrow.

I was speaking with a potential client a few weeks ago about his website. He had asked me to review his site, created with Wordpress, and make any suggestions that I felt were necessary.

Notice that I said he was a "potential" client. So, right away I was in a difficult situation.

I looked at his existing site and thought, "Uh oh, how does he ever get anyone to return?" I didn't want to come down too hard. I knew that he had asked a friend of his to put his site together. And I didn't want him to think that I was being overly critical just to get his business.