SEO is a bitch! Who doesn’t want to be number 1 in their category, with  the best keywords? But it’s an incredibly competitive business and very hard to deliver totally predictable results. There are only a few really important “best practice” techniques you can implement, and by now, everyone knows about them. You can also get really fancy and set up link exchanges with lots of questionable sites, always risking that Google or Yahoo might blacklist you if you try anything too funny.
So what can you do with SEO for a reasonable amount of money? The best thing is to set up a 6 months program, reviewable in a year, to set up the initial optimization, and install some processes in house to keep it going. If you limit yourself to only the upfront work, you’ll never stay in high positions for long, and it will hurt you in the long run. 

Here are some quick secrets to SEO success:

Secret #1 – look at the titles on your pages.  A lot of companies just put their company name in the title. Hey – if you’re looking in Google for a company to do something – sell you a product or a service –  you don’t know what company you’re looking for yet, so you wouldn’t be putting their name into the search engine! You’d be searching with keywords that describe the products you’re looking for and sometimes the geography of where you want to find them. So if you want to procure someone to do your plumbing in Nashville, TN, you’d probably enter “Plumbing Nashville”. So what would be two of the best words to put in your website title?  Plumbing and Nashville, duh!  Search engine spiders look for keyword density – in page titles, body copy, headlines and elsewhere.  So you could add a couple words to your “Plumbing Nashville” search, and still have a 50% keyword density in your page title.

Don’t stop with the homepage titles!

If you have lots of info in your site on different pages, make sure you change the titles on those pages to have a high keyword density for the search terms, and therefore the products you are optimizing for on that page.

Secret #2 - Put those good keywords in other places. If you get your titles optimized with the best keywords, you can move on to text on your site. The search engine spiders look at headlines, body text, links and copy in various place on your site. Here’s a nice trick most people don’t know about: if you’re using Firefox on a Mac, you can right click and see an option called Keyword Density.  Choose that and you’ll get an option to insert a keyword.  The quick report will tell you how “dense” your keyword or keyword phrase is in your titles, headlines, body, links, and tags.  If you see lots of zeros in the percentage column, you’ve got a lot of work to do. Figure out creative ways to bring your keywords into those text areas where the percentages are low for your desired search terms. Just be careful that you don’t go too crazy – you should strike a nice balance between good design and aggressive SEO.

Secret #3 - Be patient! That’s probably the last thing a business owner or marketer wants to hear.  When you commit to an SEO program, you want it to start giving you results immediately so you can get a quick return on your investment. Sometimes, results happen quickly, and sometimes it takes longer. A lot depends on how competitive your desired search terms are, how well you optimize for text, content and links, and how well you continue optimizing going forward.

Not a very good secret tip – so here’s one more.

Secret #4 - Get other quality sites to link to your site.  This is the hardest part of SEO. You really need links from other sites that Google, Yahoo and MSN consider to be of a certain quality. If you are marketing high end software, a bunch of links to your site that have nothing to do with your software are usually not worth the effort or the cost you might incur.  But like lots of things with SEO, this last statement isn’t always right either. “Usually”, is the operative word here – because some sites that allow you to purchase links and have nothing to do with your product or service, can be effective. Blogs can be a good place to get links back to your site, especially if there is content about your product or service category at the blog.  Link building has really become a part of many company PR programs, because PR people are in a position to get your content placed on blogs in ways that the marketing department can’t.  And if a blog in your industry is considered an authority in the marketplace, chances are a link back to your site will carry more weight with the search engines.  And here’s the last part of this secret that makes linking even more challenging – you want the links back to your site to actually spell out the keywords or keyword phrases that you are optimizing for throughout the site. This means the links back to your site, the actual site URLs need to be  ”hidden” because the search engines value the good keywords and keyword phrases higher than if your links are just your website URLs. 
Bummed about SEO now? I bummed myself out with this wretched prognosis.  But unless you don’t need to use the search engines for bringing in prospects, you gotta do it sometime, and the longer you wait, the more saturated your category will become. And then you won’t have the added benefit of longevity in your keyword categories.  (Longevity on the web with an optimized site could have been Secret #4, but I’m not telling anymore secrets for now). And you need to face this nasty fact – if you are a plumber in Nashville, expect that there are already a lot of fellow plumbers who have spent a lot of time and resources optimizing their sites for the best category keywords. So you have to figure out other creative ways to appear in keyword searches or to find your potential customers in other sites where your prospects hang out.
The bottom line is that’s there’s a lot to do in SEO, and we can help you with what to put on your site, and how to focus part of your PR program on link building and creative directory placements. Always remember that SEO is not as predictable as other forms of internet marketing and you have to be committed to an ongoing program to make it work.

Call or email us to discuss if it’s right for you.
Here are some snippets on SEO from acclaimed blogger Matt Cutts:  www.mattcutts.com
Anchor Text Best Practices

Matt's anchor text best practices include excellent general guidelines for you to follow:

1. Do what's best for the user.
2. Make it easily understood by the user.
3. Don't try to hide your intentions.
4. Be honest about the anchor text. What it says is what you should get.
Jim's anchor text best practices offer some specific advice that will help you make anchor text decisions on your site:

Use Judiciously

1. Navigation maps (the text-links at the bottom of each page) Nav Maps are a great place to put keyword enriched anchor text. These text-links tend to be found at the bottom of each page in a site. An important note is that these links WILL be used by site visitors and MUST be created and phrased with live-visitors and SE Spiders in mind.

2. Links on the INDEX page
The INDEX page of a site is the most powerful real estate found that URL. Again, all work on the INDEX page MUST consider live-visitors before SE Spiders. When keyword-enriching text on the INDEX page, there are often ways to link into internal pages. This is a good thing as it pushes spider traffic while associating the keyword (anchor text) with the specific page linked to. An important consideration is that the INDEX page often has a higher page rank than internal pages.

3. Links on Internal Pages Links on internal pages are not as important to search engine rankings as on the INDEX page. Nevertheless, each internal page is terribly important to the clients and can add to a good internal linking strategy.

4. External Links
Links coming from other URLs should use effective anchor text. With larger campaigns we can mix and match the keyword phrases targeted through anchor links in order to associate keyword phrases with specific internal pages.

Fathom, a moderator from WebProWorld, offered these six suggestions to those who want their anchor text to work well for them:

1. Important link positioning top left to bottom right. (throwing tons of links at bottom helps little).

2. Exact anchors that best support the content on the link to page It's great to use tons of links where the anchor text suggest importance to "web design" however if the page is specific to "web development" then the use of "web design" link anchors will be less effective.

3. The use of "broad" has the benefit of aiding "broadly" e.g. using links to a website about "college degrees" where the link indicates "degrees" has the benefit of gaining associate degrees, bachelor degrees, masters degrees, as well as the specific subject matter for the degree itself link computer science degrees.
A link anchor however about "masters degrees" dilutes the value to other degrees e.g. bachelor degrees - so it is a game of tradeoffs.

4. If attempting to do item #3 for "web" to capture "web design", "website design", "web development", "website development", a text link anchor looks quite inappropriate. Thus the value of image links e.g. <a title="web" href=""><img alt="Web" src="web.gif"></a> where the broad term is less apparent and the image actually reads "web design".

5. Avoid "stop words" such as and, with, by, from etc.

6. Internal site linking structure has a significant impact of supporting and propagating weight, relevancy, and PageRank to similar topical pages... e.g. Google's indented secondary results for a specific query helps show this. If you are listed (ranked) with only a single results listing - your internal linking structure is likely the cause, and fixing this can help improve overall results.
Joe of SubmitaWebSite contradicted some of what Fathom said, however. "In terms of anchor text being found on relevant vs. irrelevant sites I have yet to see any substantial proof supporting the claim that relevant websites will yield a better return in the natural rankings." From a purely pragmatic perspective though, if you've got links on a page that's more relevant to your site you're more likely to get foot traffic in that way rather than if you've got your text links up on unrelated/irrelevant sites.
Well, I imagine you're ready to start optimizing your text links. Remember to focus on those within your site as well as those your link partners use to mention you. Anchor text is an important way of showing the search engines, as well as your visitors, just what they're getting when they land on the page. And, for now, it's a powerful way to raise your ranking for particular terms.