I just finished reading a fax from a local real estate board that had some pretty startling facts. Did you know that 85% of all new visitors to your website arrive through a search engine? (You know those guys at Yahoo, Google and Ask Jeeves?
Here are a couple of other critical facts: More than 33% of all search engine users believe that the number one result on search engine results is the number one brand for the industry. And, less than 15% of users click through to the second page of results from a search engine.
So you need to get on that first page. I found a couple of places to go thanks to some helpful friends. You can try A Modest WebMasters Intro to Google or Google itself. If you feel particularly technical, you can go to Mike Greham's site, which has a download about the details of how search engines work. The download is about halfway down the page on the left hand side.
Key messages: 1) meta tags are becoming less important, Website title is very important to Google in Rankings; 2) Text on you home page is critical -- keep it topical and related. 3) Outbound links are good, just make sure that they are related to the topic of the website and don't get greedy. 4) Inbound links are even more important, but again, make sure that they come from sites that are related to your subject.
Good luck and good optimizing.
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