Ask Steve

There was a time when listing your web site in a search engine meant simply placing every word you could think of in your meta keyword and then submitting your web site to alta vista or other such sites with as many keywords as you could.  It seemed like everyone had the words sex and money in their keywords. And to some extent this worked as well as it could.  Each word was seperated by a comma and the search engine would result any site that had any of those single words in the keywords.  As search matured so did the need for a more mature approach and logging process.  With billions of web sites available search engines started storing keyphrases.  These days the more you know about your ideal or target customer the better.  This allows you to refine the content and the keywords to as specific of a group as possible.  If you are a auto repair shop specializing in hondas you know a few things about what your customers will be looking for; obviously they will be searching the words auto repair and probably honda, so there is a keyword phrase for you “auto repair honda”.  But what else do we know?  We can make a very educated guess that someone is not going to drive very far to get their car fixed.  So how about we add some locality to our keyword phrase and now we have “auto repair honda portland oregon”.  Go to Google right now and compare the result between “auto repair honda” and “auto repair honda portland oregon”.  though even the phrase “auto repair honda” is specific enough that there are only 20,000 to 30,000 results when we add locality to it we can drop the result down to almost no one.  You could have a 1st page listing day one with your site AND when you start to advertise you will find that you get much better ad results and that companies like displaying your ads because when a customer clicks on it they get what they want. 

Before anyone emails me.  YES! I know there is way more to SEO then just this one thing, but before you throw rocks think about how happy webpage owner would be with the results from just this.

 For those of you that own a web site and just had a light bulb moment YES there is even more that can go with that to make your web site perform even better