I know it sounds like it, but I did NOT rip the title of this post from The Onion! 

I have been working hard on optimizing the MailCase Locking Mailboxes website for on-site SEO.  I figured that the best strategy for starting my SEO efforts was to get all the on-site stuff put to bed first before starting work on getting quality in-bound links to the website.

I had an awesome Drupal developer help me clean up my website (MailCase is a Drupal based website).  He downloaded the XML sitemap module for Drupal and I opened a Google Webmaster Tools account and we submitted the sitemap.

The term I am trying to rank for is 'locking mailbox.'  Google has about 28k searches a month for this term and I think there would be some great revenue generated by ranking high for this term.  Before submitting the sitemap I did not even register in the SERP for 'locking mailbox.'  After submitting the sitemap (it took about a week) I was ranking 195.  Not great, but better than what I had before!

Before, my title tag was just 'MailCase | Home'  So after submitting the sitemap I went in and changed the title tag on the home page to 'MailCase | Locking Secure Mailboxes'

It took about another week for Google to register this change but once they did I moved up 140 spots to number 55 for the term 'locking mailbox.' 

I was amazed by that!!  Those title tags are CRITICAL.  I moved up 150 spots in rank in ONE WEEK! 

Now 55 is still not great, but the improvement from not even registering in the SERP's to 55 in basically two weeks doing nothing more than on-site SEO optimization blew me away!

Well, I guess that must be the easy part of SEO, right?  Now comes the hard part - building quality in-bound links.