One of the smartest long term business investments is in search engine optimization for your website. This is a cost effective internet marketing strategy with results that have an amazingly large intrinsic value, and there is also short term benefits! Finding a full service search marketing agency with integrity, knowledge and experience is a difficult task in today's market.

With each search engine optimization campaign you can...

+ Increase your overall visibility on Google, Yahoo & MSN, etc.
+ Provide you with targeted website visits
+ Increase your web sales by improving your conversion ratio
+ Grab top rankings that deliver qualified traffic to your website

Unique skills targeting the following:

+ Geo-targeting local cities and states (ex. St. Paul Steak Restaurant, etc)
+ Finding unique niche areas to obtain traffic
+ Improving link popularity to gain trust from the search engines

Keywords

Look for phrases rather than individual words. Phrases are more specific and incur more accurate results. Use phrases that accurately describe the products or services you offer. Phrases that are less competitive - meaning fewer websites are using the same phrase - will generally gain search engine traction quicker than a more competitive, widely used phrase. Select keyword phrases that generate more website traffic through search engines. The best phrases meet all four tests. I suggest using a quality analysis tool such as Wordtracker to assist you in this effort.

Once the best keyword phrases have been chosen, they must be worked into the website. Use these keywords and phrases with the right prominence and frequency throughout the body text. For best results, you can use these keywords in the domain name, page names, in meta tags, hyperlinks, and alt tags.

Before building up the pages with these keyword phrases, you need to fix any structural problems that exist within your site. Several common problems include websites constructed in frames, sites built with an online website builder, and websites built with large, slow loading graphics. Debug the HTML code to remove invalid code. I recommend checking your page(s) using http://validator.w3.org

It is very important to get other websites to link to your own. Getting other websites to link to your site has been one of the key elements of SEO for many years. Much like a popularity contest, if your website has many other websites linking to it, then it must be very important and will receive more website traffic. If these links are from highly ranked, major websites then your website must be even more important.

Now you are ready to let the search engines know your site exists. Today, a single submission to the major search engines is usually enough. I still recommend a manual submission to the open directory at dmoz.org.

Link Management

Having a solid link exchange campaign is a crucial part of any search engine optimization project to promote more website traffic on a site. Google places their greatest weight on link popularity because on-page elements can be manipulated quickly and easily. Both Yahoo and MSN also place importance on the anchor text and the quantity of incoming links, but not nearly to the level of Google.

Convincing quality, relevant sites to link to your site can be tedious, time-consuming and yes, very frustrating. Link building must be done carefully to avoid link spamming. When you are building links to increase your link popularity and increase online traffic, to whom do we link? The question of where should we link to effectively increase our ranking can be a daunting and confusing task.

The bottom line is that my link building campaigns get results.

Analytics

Now comes the hardest part... you wait. How do you know if what you did is working? You monitor your site for more website traffic and search engine spiders through analytics. (For more information, visit google.com/analytics) You should monitor your actual rankings on at least a quarterly basis with all the various engines.