Don’t subjugate good writing or journalism to SEO imperatives. Simple, declarative and direct is generally good for site visitors, as well as for search.
Make sure anyone who’s helping you with marketing, PR or web publishing and IT is aware of your SEO initiatives, so they neither overdo it nor erase the good work you’ve done.
Know there are limits. SEO will increase traffic — but once it’s done, it’s done. You’ll need to maintain a freshly updated, well organized site with good quality content in order to remain high in the rankings.
Don’t obsess over short-term movement. It can take weeks or months for SEO to work, and pages will move up and down in rankings naturally over time. Search on Google for Dick Cheney, then search again in a few days to see what we mean.
Google is the 800-pound gorilla, but there are others too. According to search experts ThomasNet, using Nielsen data, Google in January 2008 had 57 percent of searches. MSN and Yahoo combined for another 31 percent; AOL had 4.7 percent and Ask.com had 2.4 percent. Therefore, more than a third of all searches happened somewhere other than Google. But fortunately, if you try to do the right things to improve your Google rankings, they should help your rankings with other search engines too.
Paying for clicks is something a lot of businesses do. Unless your site is heavy on e-commerce, this probably isn’t for you. There are books on search engine marketing and pay-per-click (PPC) techniques. Both the books recommended below have chapters on how to buy keywords in search engines.
