Resuming our SEO conversation...
6. TEST KEYWORDS: Ideally, before you even start a new Internet Web site (or even after), you should see how many other pages match the keywords people would likely search on to find you. The fewer matches found for your search, the easier it will be to get your name up near the top. Also important are the quality of the matches that appear. Your keywords may only bring up a lot of garbage that your potential audience would have no interest in anyway. Therefore, with the proper strategy, you could be the only site of your type that appears near the top of that search. There may be phrases that people are likely to search for which are much easier to achieve good rankings on than more common words and phrases. This strategy can gain you unexpected traffic.
7. PHRASES: As mentioned, many people will likely use multiple-word phrases to find you--particularly when single words do not provide adequate scope for the search. The syntax for this varies by engine, but phrases are generally searched for surrounded by quotes. Therefore, make a list of 2-3 word phrases people are likely to search for. When placing keywords on your page, make sure you always include them in a phrase that the visitor might use.
Keep the important words chained together in sentences on the page. If the user searches on "KEYWORD1" AND "KEYWORD2" then you only have to have the words in the same proximity on the page. If, however, they search on "KEYWORD1 KEYWORD2" along with the surrounding quotes, then the words MUST be together on your page, preferably multiple times to find a match. Therefore, it's a good idea to create a Mission to monitor your position for both "baseball cards" and just baseball cards as an example.
Sidenote: Several Web site log programs will now tell you which keyword/phrase a user typed in a search engine to find you. This is often helpful in understanding which positions are pulling the best.
8. CASE-SENSITIVITY: If the user types the word Baseball then most engines will search for "Baseball" with an uppercase "B" ONLY. If your page has only "baseball" in it, you'll not be found! On the other hand, if they search for "baseball" and your page has "Baseball" on it, most engines default to finding words of any case when the keyword used was in all lower case. Therefore, it pays to make sure you have at least some of the keywords in uppercase or starting with an uppercase letter if the user might search that way. The easiest place to do this is in the title of the page, in meta tags, and at the beginning of sentences.
9. BAD SPELLING CAN BE GOOD: Search engines don't have spell checkers. Also, product names can have slight variations. For example, MicroLogic has a product called Info Select. However, people could easily search on MicroLogic, Micro Logic, Infoselect, or Info Select. Look for obvious mistakes people are likely to make and then incorporate some of them into one of your pages in some way to pick up traffic you'd otherwise miss.
