Music City Networks

How do you get your site to the top of a search engine's results? Ah, the million dollar question. We will talk about SEO in several posts over the next few months, but to get started, I would answer that million dollar question with a two-cent question: With what keyword(s) do you want your site to appear at the top of the results? Do you know where your customers are finding you? Do you know what your competition is?

I won't go into the long tail theory here, but the keywords you want to choose boils down to people's buying cycle. It's better to optimize for a keyphrase that meets your user when they are ready to engage than to focus on broader phrases ("red chevy malibu" is a better keyphrase for SEO than "cars" because it will engage users who know what they are looking for rather than someone at the research phase of their buying cycle). To help you determine the keyphrases that have high traffic and low competition, there are several sites that can help you:

Keyword Discovery
Word Tracker
Google Search Term Tool


Once you determine the keywords and/or phrases you want to optimize with, you should work with your web designer to help create landing pages that contain those keywords in the title, description, keyword tag, body, and links. More on that in a bit...