While thinking about what to write, I realized that I had an experience this weekend that is a perfect testimony of why having a presence within the major search engines is so important.

I was racking my brain trying to figure out what I was going to get my mom for Mother’s Day (yes, a little last minute) and the first thing that I did was hop onto Google and search for “Mothers Day Gifts, Raleigh, NC”. Within about 5 minutes I had purchased a gift card from a spa just down the road from my mom’s house and ordered a bouquet of flowers to be delivered to her the very next day. After my sigh of relief that it was taken care of and I could go about enjoying the rest of my weekend, I sat back and realized just how important Search Engine Optimization (SEO) really is. If it wasn’t for that particular spa and florist taking the time to effectively optimize their sites using the keywords that I had searched for (including local keywords), I wouldn’t have stumbled across their site and would have been forced to find another gift. But because both of these links appeared within Google’s organic search results, I found them easily. In addition, my entire shopping experience (a total of about 5 minutes) was quite painless. The ease of making purchases through these websites was almost effortless and very user-friendly.

Having just moved to Florida, I truly appreciated the ability to find something so easily near my hometown. So keep in mind when optimizing your site that you can take advantage of last minute shoppers. I also highly recommend including local keywords as these can help searchers from out of state, like myself, find your products or services.

While I often hear people talking about keyword density and writing original and relevant content, I don’t hear people speak about how important it is to be consistent. How many times have you come across a site where the content is targeted well for a particular key phrase, but there is little or no use of it in the title, description or keyword tags? How about sites that are using entirely different keywords in the Meta data?

The search engines are beginning to look at keyword and description Meta tags again thus making it very important to use them in a way that is going help improve the rankings for a particular site. Title tags have always been important. We have all seen people abuse these tags by keyword stuffing and other spamming techniques. This may have worked years ago, but as the algorithms continue to improve, these techniques are no longer effective. There are however, ways to use these tags to help surpass your competition in the rankings.

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Recently I came across an article that caught my attention. It was an interesting read on creating content, and there was some good advice on writing original text. For example, keeping the copy relevant to the service or product offered on your site and writing an FAQ page, making sure to insert your key phrases. This is good honest advice that will work for the long run.

There was one part, however, that made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Here’s a quote, “Bear in mind, authorities and experts in a given field are often seeking collateral exposure, which you can provide them. The exercise is to find an article published online that contains content related to your industry and ask for permission to “reprint” it on your site.”

I must strongly disagree; reprinting articles from other sites can cause problems with duplicate content. When the search engines determine that the content on two different pages are duplicate, one will be chosen seemingly at random by the “duplicate content filter” in the algorithm and sent to the supplemental index (otherwise known as Google Hell). You are better off writing original content that refers to the article and providing a link to it.

If you are having trouble coming up with original content, you could consider implementing a blog on your site and discussing the issues that come up on a daily or weekly basis. You can also encourage you customers to comment on these blogs, which helps to create user generated content. If you’re still having trouble, consider contracting a professional copywriter who is trained in creating original text.

I will leave you with this thought, be very careful when seeking out advice about increasing the rankings and the traffic of your site. Although the advice you find may be well intentioned, it may inadvertently harm you. Always check and double check any information you find regarding SEO.