1. DECIDE ON KEYWORDS This is probably the most important thing to get right and from the start too. Why? Surely the search engines will pick up my page content and rank me on the first page for all my terms? hahaha nooooooooooo. You need to think about the terms you want to rank for and get a balance between being to broad with your keywords and being too narrow. Here's what I mean by that. Take our business for instance. We do IT, computer support, website programming, software programming, networking, training, remote support, contract support, enterprise level IT, SQL databases, MS Access databases and the list goes on and on.... Hence the name Anything IT. But where does that leave us with our chosen keywords? Well I doubt we would get many hits if we chose "Anything IT" as our keywords do you? That would be fine for people searching for our company but it doesn't help when people are searching for computer support does it? Additionally, we should consider the competition of the keywords. "Computer support" returns 1,490,000,000 results on Google! So, if we have chosen computer support as our keywords we now need to narrow it down a bit. We could add the UK after it or south west but would people be searching for computer support UK (181,000,000 results)? or computer support south west (87,300,000 results by the way)? I also have to admit to myself that my company is not as big as Microsoft (yet) and therefore does not have such a high standing in the world of IT. So, we chose the term computer support plymouth as one of our chosen keyword phrases. And we are doing quite well with it too! (4,510,000 results and we have the number ONE and TWO position). What can you learn from this? Well, first of all try and be as specific to your chosen profession as possible. If you are a company that offers courier services across the south west of England (Devon & Cornwall), then couriers south west might be an ok place to start your research, although I think you might have to choose several phrases like courier services plymouth; courier services exeter; couriers truro & courier services torbay (for instance) instead. So, think about the products or services that your website is going to be talking about and where your company provides those services too. You might also want to consider using the name of major suppliers in your keywords if those products are a significant part of your busiuness. For instance: Hygena Kitchens Plymouth or Panasonic widescreen TVs Exeter Of course, don't forget your company name as there will surely be people out there who know your name but nothing else. Anything IT is a tricky one to do well in as the 'IT' is seen as the word 'it'. However, as it happens we are number TWO of 590,000,000 results for that term, so again doing ok I think So, get a balance between the competitiveness of the keywords (do searches to find out how many results there are) and the products/services your company offers. Well, thats all for now on keywords. I will of course add more on keywords as and when I think of it. One final point - don't be too impressed with our current results...what if noone EVER searches for those terms? Noone would ever visit our sites! Best of luck! Article written: 28th April 2006 Article modified: Not applicable

Home page of Posidacious!