A friend of a friend recently asked me to help his search engine placement.  He was then listed at 156 in Google.  His pages were hosted by Yellow Pages, and designed by them, but they did give him a tool to modify them.  I made very few changes:

  1. Changed the title from his firm’s name to a description of what he did
  2. Added a description of what he did
  3. Changed the <h1> tag from “Welcome” to what he did
  4. Added better text, written by him, to describe what he does.
  5. Asked him to register with  Google Places, Yelp, and Bing Local Listings.

Now he is on page 1!  It only took me a few hours, mostly learning the YP update Tool. Since then I have seen so many pages where these simple rules were ignored.