Add Keywords Reflecting Your Local Cities And State You can also target local areas by including them in your title/meta tags and text of your web pages. List only cities and state you reside in and/or provide services to. You never know who will be looking for a local contact producer of "blue widgets" in your city or state. Some people prefer to work with a local company. Adding in those type of specifics, even on your contact page with your local information, can pull in traffic your local competitors are missing.

Check Your Site Statistics Last but certainly not least, check your search engine stats program or raw server logs to see what terms your visitors are using to find your website. There may be combinations of words your visitors are using you have not thought of or that may not be in content of your pages.

Incorporate Keyword Phrases Into Content Of Your Web Pages Once you have your list of varied keyword phrases, work them into your web page. Incorporating these terms into your web pages should "make sense", in other words, they should read well and not sound "spammy". Most of all, they should realistically be part of content of page, not placed there only because you need them in content. Have another person read your copy to see if it sounds reasonable to them.

Keyword Variations Make A Difference Don't miss out on keywords your competitors might miss. Those extra keywords could translate into profits and increased viewing of your website by visitors who might otherwise not find you.

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Daria Goetsch is founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing (http://www.searchinnovation.com), a Search Engine Promotion company serving small businesses. Besides running her own company, Daria is an associate of WebMama.com, an Internet web marketing strategies company. She has specialized in search engine optimization since 1998, including three years as Search Engine Specialist for O'Reilly & Associates, a technical book publishing company.

Copyright © 2003 Search Innovation Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Permission to reprint this article is granted as long as all text above this line is included in its entirety. We would also appreciate your notifying us when you reprint it: please send a note to reprint @ searchinnovation.com.

In addition spider was stopping dead at drop down menus and graphic links it could not move beyond. Spiders essentially follow HTML text links and that’s about it. If you stick to that rule you won’t go too far wrong.

Our challenge was therefore to bring every page, no matter where it was in site, to a level 3 position at least – without changing structure of site itself, so spider would index it and page ranking would be higher. This would give us 520 marketable, optimised pages rather that 126.

The solution was quite simple. A site map – we simply spent a few hours setting up a site map with a link from index page ( making site map level 2) and then an HTML text link to every page on site, making every page on site at least level 3.

The next time site was spidered by Google, there it was, 520 content rich optimised pages and an increase in traffic of 1000%

Big sites, make most of them, don’t keep your content hidden under a bushel!!