October 2, 2011 at 3:30 pm ET by Scott Wilson

What a fantastic Monday!  Rankhigher connects with one of the most reputable business schools across Canada, and it was an honour greeting the staff, faculty, and future marketing experts.  Today I took the liberty in speaking with Dr. Ruhai’s Wu’s fourth year Marketing class.  I was quite moved by the thoughts and feedback of the student body, and included them with my entry

As a Social Media Speaker, I was capable of grasping the attention of the DeGroote Students as I discussed some critical elements on becoming successful with both Search Engine Optimization and Social Media.  I elaborated on The Three Secrets of Search Engine Optimization, and how to apply them online.

Three secrets of SEO and how to apply them to everything you do online.

Making your company stand out on the Internet can seem like a daunting task. With over three billion searches per day and over a trillion pages to choose from, how is one company’s web page able to come out on top? If you follow these three simple strategies your company will perform better on the internet. This works for the largest ecommerce websites, B-B websites, Blogs, politician websites and even small companies can top the page in their next potential customer’s internet search.

Secret 1- Gain Trust: Google assigns trust on a page by page basis. Until your web page has earned the trust of the search engines, it will not rank highly in search. You earn trust based on the links you receive and the age of the page. Earn trust for your site by receiving links to your site from other related and trusted web sites. Getting a trusted web page to post a link to you is like getting a citation or vote of confidence; the more citations (links) and page age, the more trusted your content will become.

Secret 2 – Get Read by Google: It’s important search engines are able to read your site content. Create content that is easily read by creating your webpage in HTML or other Google favorable formats. Avoid creating sites entirely in flash as search engines like Google have difficulty reading the content and it will not appear in search results.  Google’s goal is to organize the world’s information. Google continues to get better at reading and indexing a wide variety of published content from around the globe. On the flip side of the coin creative and highly technical webmasters continually develop new ways to publish content and they quite often publish content in a way that makes it difficult or impossible for Google to read it. It’s in your company’s best interest to make it easy for Google to read all of your content quickly and easily. Later in this chapter you will find specific examples and instructions to do just that.

Secret 3 – Get Laser Beam  /Focused: Often a single web page will contain information on many different products or services offered. This can pose a problem, if the web page is about ten different things, then the search engine will rank it for all ten. For example, the first product could appear on page 100, product two could be ranked 1000, and so on. This keeps your web page from appearing on the first page of a search result. To avoid this, each page on your web site should be dedicated to a specific product or service as it will attach a specific keyword to your page and result in better search results.

Using these simple strategies every time you update your web pages will ensure your strategies are sound and this will help you get noticed and gain business. “The Internet is filled with fantastic content that no one can find,”  - “I call these web sites, ‘billboards in the jungle’ because no matter how attractive or great your web page content is, it’s not going to help you gain business if it doesn’t show up on a simple Google keyword search, ”.

Let’s look at several scenarios where applying the three strategies not only will help your business but will protect you from devastation.

I was speaking at a travel industry event in Montreal last year when after my seminar a lady who owned a boutique hotel in Montreal came to me to ask why her website redesign cost her all of her search traffic, her bookings and possibly her business. She invested heavily in a re-brand of her website but inadvertently lost her Google trust, her top rankings and her customers. If she would have followed the three secrets her business would be thriving. Here is what happened and how secret #1 if followed would have saved her.  In this case she threw away her Google trust. Secret # 1 is about acquiring Google trust, therefore it naturally follows that we want to keep our Google trust once we have acquired it.

Over the next few weeks, I want to personally share my thoughts and knowledge on building Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Success.  Be sure to stay tuned!