2. "Think before you speak" – Get into your client's minds and think how they would search for your business. Thinking and researching what keywords and phrases best fit your product, budget, and customer's expectations will help you plan and execute a successful rankings campaign.

3. "I don't care if everyone else is doing it" – Do not create another website that has a META title tags that say "Welcome to our Website." Use your researched keywords and phrases to write title, description, and keyword META tags that are relevant to your site and distinguish you from your competition. The same concept applies to your content. Create content that is unique from others in your industry.

4. "Speak like a gentleman" – Make your website human and rankings friendly and you will have a winner. Don't use your keywords and phrases over and over and over again within your website copy just for search engine spiders, because once a human arrives at your site they are going to think it is garbage and will never call you, email you, or tell others about your website.

5. "You're not walking out of the house dressed like that" – Creating URLs that are 200 characters long and full of numbers and special character strings like &, #, and ? make your site harder for search engines to crawl and index. Create URLs that are as short as possible and describe the content on that page. Your site will be easier to crawl and visitors will be able to easily refer your website to others.

6. "This is my house, so you will follow my rules" – While Google consistently gives advice like "get authoritive links to your website" to increase your rankings, the reality is that most of the other factors that they use to rank websites changes frequently. You need to be on top of these changes so you can make sure your site complements the latest ranking factors to continue to increase your rankings.

7. "I've got eyes in the back of my head" – Google is watching where your links come from and so should you. They can tell if the websites you are getting your links from actually mention your site because it is worth visiting or if you are just swapping links with another site because you are both attempting to improve your rankings. Google always prefers one-way links.

8. "Call me when you get there" – Tell Google where your business is physically located. Make sure your physical address, local phone number, and other geographic indicators appear on your website so you can rank for geographic terms relevant to your industry.

9. "Because I said so" – The way Google deals with some issues like the DMOZ directory can be pondering. Your website can gain a lot of credibility by being listed in DMOZ, but the reality is, DMOZ is dead. Most of the categories are abandoned and it is virtually impossible to get a listing in them. Why does Google still give them so much weight "Because they said so, that’s why"

10. "If your friends jumped off a bridge would you do it too?" – Following the crowd isn't going to get you very far with Google. It is easy to do a search on the "Top 10 SEO tips" or "How to get to number 1 in Google" and find lots of information on how to increase your website's ranking in Google, but the truth is, most of the advice you will find on these pages is just the basics. Coming up with a strategy to rank well for YOUR website, in YOUR industry, at THIS time requires much more than a top 10 list. You need to have the one thing that is sometimes the hardest to find – creativity and individuality. All of your competitors are already following the advice on the top 10 lists. What are you going to do that is unique that will help your website rank above theirs?

My mom always said that being a mother is like being in the Peace Corps, "It is the toughest job you will ever love." I think that quote also applies to optimizing your website for the search engines. It isn't an easy job, but when you begin receiving targeted traffic to your website leading to an increase in your bottom line, you begin to feel that all of the care, nurturing, sweat, and maybe even tears you put into developing your baby was worth all of the pain.