Google is the best search engine because they provide their searchers with the most current and relevant materials on the web. How do they know what’s current and relevant? They have crawlers that find that information out for them. What do the crawlers look for? For the most part, they look for relevant copy that is updated frequently. Aside from the obvious, however, meta tags are still important (although not as important as they once were) and inbound and outbound links.

This translates into an actual marketing objective. The issue of search engine listings needs to be integrated into the copy and design of the site to address the needs of the “big picture”. This includes looking at goals, customer value, pay-per-click ads, regional advertising and the biggest of all, the organic search engine listings that appear when you type in a search term.

What keywords do you pick for your site? That’s the challenge – along with knowing where to put them in tags & copy. You want to appeal to the person searching at the time they want to make a purchase. Would someone that wants to buy a bicycle helmet type in “Bell Helmet” highlighting the brand? They might if they had already researched the product. Probably a larger chance they’d search for “what are the safest bicycle helmets?” or “children’s bicycle helmets” or “bicycle helmet reviews”. You get the idea!

In addition to the initial consultation, it’s so important to have ongoing reviews of site performance through free services such as Google Analytics. Keywords/stats/links/ads need to be reviewed over time to determine effectiveness.

Lastly, one of the best ways to generate traffic these days is to make use of web 2.0 which is the social networking aspect of the internet. Creating a blog is essential to show knowledge of a topic. It helps to also have a presence on flickr, linked-in and other online arenas for making contacts. Contaqcts = site visitation and THAT boosts your search engine listing.

I know – it’s really overwhelming. I’d be happy to help out!