Gerald hired the perfect web designer for his site.  His site is beautiful, loads fast, and represents his business with a memorable, professional presentation.  But the expected jump in sales leads doesn’t happen in the first month of being on the web.  Gerald calls his web designer and asks if there is something wrong with the web site.

Diamond Studded Widgets

Gerald sells diamond studded widgets, but when he types, “diamond studded widgets” in Google, his site isn’t there. He asks, “Did you put in the right key word?”

The quick answer is, “Yes.” But the complete answer is, “Yes, but that won’t help.”

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The majority of my clients don’t want to talk about search engine optimization before I start on their website, and several of them are surprised they are not atop the Gooogle rankings for their favorite search term on the day their site goes live.  I am not joking when I say, “many clients expect to be all over Google on the day their site goes live.”

I’ve had a good bit of success with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for several of my clients over the past few years.  I’ll be sharing some of what I have learned here in this category, but I won’t tell ALL of my secrets.

I’ll start with the most important lesson about getting good search engine rankings.  It is not something to learn, but something many new site owners need to unlearn.  Keywords have absolutely NOTHING to do with your Google ranking and very little to do with ranking at other search engines.

The web is frought with “keyword generators” and “metatag machines.”  But that doesn’t change the fact that Google ignores your keywords.  Quit thinking, “Keywords,” and start thinking “optimization”.  I’ll talk about optimization in later posts.

Experiment #1: I’ll try to get this page ranked on Google for diamond studded widgets and not change the keywords. Today is July 7. Give me a couple of months and we’ll see if it works. I hope I can beat this diamond studded phone.