Actually, getting in the #1 spot is best, but I will settle for the top 5 or even anywhere on the first page for very competitive keywords. Obtaining those top rankings for your targeted keywords in Google will obviously be very important to achieving your online goals.

If you have a brick and mortar store, and rely on walk-in traffic for your survival, you may be wondering what the Internet can do for your business. Believe it or not, a lot - and you don’t even need a website.

Google lists results of all searches in order of relevance to the search words. How do you become relevant? It’s no use being number nine hundred in order of relevance if people searching Google only look at the first ten or twenty listed. It’s no use having the best looking website if nobody sees it either.

With dozens of free web analytics tools available in the market, Google Analytics stands out because it provides data like no other tool does. Just add a few lines of JavaScript code to your website’s footer and you have access to a vast amount of metrics you can slice and dice.

You've just built your website and you want to show up on the search engines. You start reading about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and one of the first things that jumps out at you is something called "Google PageRank". You know about the big dog of the search engines, but what is Page Rank and why is it important in what you're trying to do?

Google Adwords is an incredibly powerful marketing tool with an instant global reach that can take your business from nowhere to an overnight success. Why wouldn’t a new marketer take advantage of such a powerful tool? I can answer that question with another question. Why wouldn’t you let someone with a new driver’s license behind the wheel of a race car? Because, unless they are extremely lucky, they are going to crash and burn. Google Adwords is the Formula One of online marketing and it is not for beginners.

Do you really want your website on page one of Google for your chosen keyword phrase(s)? What do you want your online marketing campaign to accomplish for you? I asked a potential new SEO Coaching client that first question last week. From my end of the phone call, it sounded as if he almost fell out of his chair!

This morning I woke up to someone having submitted a pile of SEO questions using our newsletter question form. At first I thought, “Yikes, that’s kind of pushy to think I have time to answer all those questions!” But then I remembered that this was a newsletter week and I still had no idea what I was going to write about. A second look at the questions made me think that you guys would probably be interested in the answers to many of them, so it worked out perfectly.

In Part 1 and Part 2 of How to Optimize for Google , I discussed general website optimization, links, and Google webmaster tools. In Part 3 we will look at a number of other considerations which play a role in successful rankings in Google, and also touch on some tactics which are best avoided.

Optimizing for top Google rankings includes a number of factors. In Part 1 of How to Optimize for Google we discussed Onsite Optimization. In Part 2 we will touch on Incoming Links as well as using Google Webmaster Tools.