Being number 1 on search engines isn’t the easiest thing to achieve. Depending on the niche you’re trying to rank #1 on Google and Yahoo, competition will vary. Here are 10 SEO tips to make sure you achieve your ranking goals.
Target keyword phrases with 2 or more words

When choosing the keywords to target in your yahoo and google SEO campaign, instead of targeting words like “shoes“", target keyword phrases such as "”sport shoes for men”. Doing so, you will target the following keyword phrases:

    * sport shoes
    * shoes for men
    * sport shoes for men
    * shoes

This will attract much more traffic than targeting single words that you have almost no chance to even be on the first page of search results.
Create inbound links with relevant anchor text

When you want to create an inbound link from your homepage to your “sport shoes for men” page, create the link with a text anchor that is relevant to the linked page.

This will tell search engines what the page is about the they will rank it higher because it assures them they will not link to non relevant content. Make full use of this is your whole website to have a better SEO approach.
Your title is the most important tag for search engines

Be careful to what you put in your <title> tag. Include the main keywords you want to target in your page. If you have a page called that targets the “sport shoes for men” keyword, make sure to insert the keyword as-is in your title.For now, this is the most important SEO technique to
use with the main search engines. If the rest of the page is relevant to the title, you have a very good chance at ranking high on google.
Don’t waste much time with META tags

While they once were the most important thing to do in SEO, META tags are now less than useless for google. Yahoo still accords some importance to them so you still should insert them. Just don’t overdo it and waste precious hours trying to tweak them to perfection. Instead of doing that, create other quality keyword rich articles or tweak the actual content of your existing articles.

Don’t stuff keywords in your META tags that arent used in the actual content. Some sites have been penalized doing so. According to many SEO experts, google totally ignores the tag but other search engines could see it as spam and penalize you.
Don’t assume you know what keywords people search for

When determining what keywords you will target on your new page, don’t assume you know what keywords the users will search for when looking for info related to your page.

To make sure you target the right keywords, use keyword tools provided by Google and Yahoo. You can also use Wordtracker but it ain’t free. Enter a couple keywords and the tools will give you hundreds more that you havn’t though of. They will also give you relative numbers to know how much times the keyword(s) was search for in the last month/year.

After seleting a few keywords that interest you, go on google and type “selected keyword”. This will give you all the pages in the index which contain that exact keyword in their page. This gives you a good idea of the competition for that particular term. Try to find keyword phrases with high demand and low competition. This is called finding “niche” keywords.