An important thing about the Google Dance

[flensborg]

[Lynn Terry]

What can we do to influence our Google Ranking? Or more specifically, what is your best piece of advice to someone looking to get more exposure from the search engines?

[flensborg]

[Lynn Terry]

Okay... that gives me a good start. (I appreciate you so much, Henrik!! ) ... now you've got my interest.

So I've created a website, put it online and want to promote it through the search engines (considering that I have set up my inbound links - which I have - and have my 'marketing plan' all mapped out). The first thing I need to do is keyword research, right? I need to find out what people are searching for versus what I am offering - and try to use key words that will put me in front of the search engine users (specifically, my targeted market)... also researching the less-competitive key words for better chances of ranking results in a search. This is my understanding so far - feel free to correct me if I'm wrong

Hmm... that said, I need to figure out which keywords I am currently using and which keywords I should be using (so I know what to change).

- Gosh this is a lot more complicated than it used to be! Remember the day when you inserted meta tags, submitted your site to search engines and did simple link exchanges? LOL! -

Am I correct in assuming that "keywords" and "keyword phrases" are the text that you use in:

- your title bar
- between bold or strong tags
- in your text links
- in your ALT tags (not sure on this one)
- what about your header? such as when you use the h1 or h2 or h3 font size?

... and do Meta Tags even count anymore? Maybe for smaller search engines? Or not at all? Do we put them in there or leave them out?

What did I forget?

Obviously your content matters - I've heard that said over and over again... is it:

- how many times a keyword or keyword phrase is used in your contents text?
- how many pages within your site that your navigation leads to?
- how relative the words in your content are to your other keyword usage (such as in the instances above: title, bold text, links, etc)

... or is it all of the above - or none of the above? Maybe some of the above and some that I am missing altogether?

Gosh - all these things considered (and considering how many more things I feel sure you are going to bring to my attention) - a person like me that already has a website up with a hundred or so pages floating out there would really have to sit down and re-work the pages one by one... wouldnt they?

Okay - I'm in - its a good investment of my time and I'm ready to learn! First I need to really sit down and take a good long look at my definition of the targeted market for both and .

...and then what keywords those people would use in searches... that relate to what I have to offer them...

Do you recommend using services such as and for these tasks?