These seven steps assume you’ve been given a fully finished site to optimise and you don’t have much time! Follow them and you can’t go far wrong.

1. Decide which pages will focus on which terms

This is crucial. Choose no more than a handful of terms per page. I am a believer that landing pages are for SEO as well as PPC (those who disagree can berate me in comment section below). Ensure this strategy does not become confused, with more than one page focusing on exactly the same key phrase - focusing on longer-tailed key phrases is fine though.

2. Alter page titles

Put priority terms at the front end of the title and make sure they are written with word proximity in mind. The closer together the words within the title, the better the effect on the ranking of the phrase combining those words. For example, the title ‘One two three’ is likely to have better rankings for the phrase ‘one two’ than the phrase ‘one three’. Also, phrases that are entered after the first 60-70 characters will be far less effective than those within the first 60-70 characters.

3. Write keyword rich content

Don’t over-do it on the key phrases but make sure there are a couple of each in there. At least 250-300 words on each landing page is best, though every little helps.

4. Ensure there is no duplicate content

Make sure there is only one version of each page – use .htaccess to redirect and robots.txt to exclude where necessary. Ensure identical content isn’t elsewhere on the web with use of Copyscape or simply by copying and pasting the text into Google. Make sure there is only one version of your homepage – Google views http://yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com/index.html and http://yoursite.com/index.html as 4 different pages. Make sure it knows which one you prefer by using Google Webmaster Tools and the .htaccess file.

5. Insert relevant headings

Make sure there are headings on the page containing the key terms - but also ensure they do not exactly match the page titles.

6. Insert relevant meta tags

Write an interesting 120 character-long meta description mentioning relevant key terms. Ensure that the meta keywords tag does not mention anything that isn’t actually mentioned in the body of your content.

7. Upload sitemaps

Xml sitemap is vital to inform Google about your site structure and URLs. Html sitemap is useful.