Ever since the beginning of the search engine, the coveted prize is in being ranked at the top or very close to it. You see, when folks search for something, more often than not, they won’t scroll down three to five pages to see Google results numbered 30 through 50. Today’s searcher really wants to know how close they can get to what they are looking for without having to go to another page or scrolling down as well! Realistically, I find that folks are a little challenged - as I too had to do some soul searching to figure out what makes sense for my business. So here’s what we have learned:

Select Terms that are not overpopulated. If I search for ‘wine’, I have to wade through 910 million results. If I select ‘red wine’ I pared the field down to a mere 294 million. Wow, that’s a two-thirds reduction!  Now I type in ‘Tempranillo’ (the noble grape of Spain equivalent to the Cabernet Sauvignon grape) and I am down to 7 million results. If I now ask for what I am really looking for 'tempranillo match', I am down to a mere 311 thousand results. Here, I find a site called winematch.com rated #1 that is displaying a number of Tempranillo wines, which was really my end goal.

Here’s the lesson. People are thinking more and typing in more words than ever into search engines in an attempt to narrow their field of search as much as possible. They are looking to find what they can on the first Google results page visible to them. Finding things on the first page greatly reduces our time and frustration factor when looking for stuff. After all, it’s far easier to search through 311 thousand results rather than 910 million.

You can use Google's Keyword Tool to plug in all the common terms you think people will use to find a business like yours. The tool will show you all the keyword phrases and what kind of traffic in general each receives. Also, it will suggest other phrases along with their traffic and competitiveness on which you might want to also focus.

Page optimization is critical. How each page is optimized is important, but it needs to be built that way. Are those important keywords sprinkled on each page generously without it looking like you intentionally planted them to cater to the search engines?  Remember, you have two audiences here – the people that read them and the search engines. Your site needs to have links that go down to page levels that reinforce what you’re all about. It is allowable to have some redundancy. From a best practice standpoint, mention of a keyword three times on each page brings search engine benefits.

Roundbrix made the decision to build our website based on SEO perspective from the ground up. This enables the website to show up #1 on google for about 20 different phrases because the website was built specifically to get high on the search engines. For example, we did not use any tables. It is recommended to use CSS only so that the search engines have a lot less html code to look through when spidering your website. Also, we enable quite a bit of cross-linking. As an example, from the home page you can access our HP Partner page while at the same time you can also access it under our DATA page and several other pages.

Title importance is most often overlooked. I go to so many sites, and the title is just plain wrong or worst yet empty. A web designer is not a search engine optimization specialist! Remember this - the first sixty (60) characters of the title is what search engines care about the most. Also, the more important keyword phrases should be on the left part of the title. So pull up your web site, highlight over your favicon in the toolbar and see if that agrees with what you believe folks will type into a search bar to find your business. We also find that adding location, like ‘Irvine’ or ‘Orange County’ also helps quite a bit. 

Getting a potential new client to your site as an initial introduction is the most important thing. Some websites use something more unique in their title that allows someone to find you, like perhaps an item or service more unique to your business than to others. This increases your odds of being found whereas just using a keyword that is too widely used in your area of product line or service expertise might make the competition a bit too great.