Long-term search engine strategy is the meat and potatoes of search engine optimization.

It's not enough simply to submit your site to search engines. That will just get your site listed. What's important is getting listed in the Top 20 listings, and preferably the Top 10...the first page. Being listed 2,154th out of 680,312 pages isn't going to get your site much traffic from that search engine.

The process of optimizing a page, or a site, is a time-intensive process requiring knowledge of the algorithmic process utilized by search engines to rank one site in relation to all of the others within that search engine's index. This information is not published anywhere, rather, it is discovered through statistics, probability, analysis of results, and trial and error. We've been working in this area for the past 9 years and have developed a very strong understanding as to what works, and what doesn't.

NOTE: Don't be fooled by the inexperienced who tell you that they'll "put your keywords in META tags" and the like. META tags used to be important, but nowadays they can hurt you more than help you, especially in the hands of the inexperienced. For example, some search engines will actually PENALIZE your website for having pages with keywords in META tags that do not appear in the regular body copy on that page.

This is not something that you want to take lightly. Just as you wouldn't go to the local grocer for accounting advice, and you wouldn't go ask a plumber about the timing in your automobile, you don't want to have a non-expert give you advice with regards to search engine optimization. Many, many people can build a website; only a few people really know about search engine optimization.

Be careful.

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