Simply put it is about the words that you use and how you put them together.  It isn’t about the fancy colors, images, flash, and videos; although, these help your visitors once on your web site, they do not help them find your web site.

Try a little exercise today and really watch the results you get.  In Google type in “website” and see what the results look like, see how many times you see the word “website” in the title and the text description of each web site.

Now, do another search with the term “web site”.  In this case take particular notice if the order of the web sites changed, or maybe you see a completely different set.

An added bonus, type in “websiet”, yes it is intentionally misspelled.  First notice that Google will give you a suggestion of what term they really think you are trying to search for, and usually Google will also display a couple of results from the word that it is guessing you are looking for.  Go below these suggestions and what is there?  The word is a real word, just not an English word.

One last thing to try is repeat these three searches in the different search engines and see what results come up, are there any similarities?

This exercise is all about getting an understanding about how a search engine treats a query (that is geek speak for “question”).  Each time someone is trying to find your web site they are searching with different terms, possibly misspelled terms, and more than likely variations in the order of the words.

What does this tell you about how to deal with the text in your web site?  A lot!

When a professional SEO company looks at the copy, or words, on a web site there are three things that are considered: keyword density, readability, and is it scanability.

To follow what a professional SEO company would do:

• Make a list of phases, three to four words, that you think people will use to find you.
• Look at the words currently on your web site; are any of the phrases currently on your web site?
• Is there more than one combination of that phrase on you web site?
• How many times do you mention those phrases?
• Are those phrases used in your headings?

Small changes to your text on your web site can mean gigantic changes to the way the search engines read your web site, as well as the ability to match what you are saying to how people would find you.

Happy keyword hunting!

Now I don’t want to get caught up in the semantics of what they’re talking about… that would likely lead us off topic – but ever think about what it’s really accomplishing?

Well search engine keywords aren’t too much different… think about it… “My keyword ranks number 1 on Google, and number 3 on MSN and Yahoo… Beat that!”

This is what I call a “Keyword Trophy”. Where you get some mythical prize if you rank number one for some set of keywords. But is a keyword trophy really worth anything? Sometimes, but usually not.

Let me explain. If you had no competition, then what is the real value of a keyword ranking? There isn’t one. For instance, I bet I could create a site today and rank number one on most search engines for the keyword phrase “itchy witchy seems kinda funky but might pay me more money in the long run” – some random made up phrase that I’ll now rank for, but how many people are going to be searching for it? And more importantly, what are they going to do with it?

That’s kinda my point here… the “what are they going to do with it” part – Your goal is conversions, and new customers right? So if all your keyword trophies aren’t converting, then what is there value? Do you see where I’m going with this? Conversions and customers are the real goal of Internet marketing and search engine optimizations… not top rankings. Does this mean that you should stop trying to rank high? nope. Not at all. But focus on the important keywords… the ones that convert traffic into customers. Otherwise all those SEO consultant fees aren’t paying for themselves… just your ego and the size of your… whatever it was that was being measured.