Small businesses are not the only group who requires Search Engine Optimization. Even Fortune 500 companies need to spend time working on SEO. According to a 2009 survey conducted by Conductor, more than half of Fortune 500 companies had almost no natural search visibility, with their targeted keywords not within the top 100 natural search results. None of the Fortune 500 companies surveyed had a majority of their keywords ranking in the top 25 search results.

The following are some great ways to improve SEO and make your web site more effective. These practices are ethical, so they will not be greatly affected by Google’s algorithm changes.

1. Create content for people not the search engines
2. Make sure keywords are present in prominent places of your web site such as the headers, subheads, title tags and meta description snippets.
3. Structuring the web sites so that important keyword pages are high in the site architecture and easily found by search engines and people.
4. Create well-written engaging content is an integral way to attract quality links. Use social media sites such as Twitter to get links. Tweet a link to your web site or add it as your profile link. Twitter is crawled by search engines frequently, this will help your new web site to be discovered more quickly.
5. Don’t use link exchanges.  Instead offer testimonials to business vendors that you work with for links.

If your company is conservative with your cash flow, you maybe losing money with Adwords. Advertisers must have the cash to go negative on their ad spending while customer life time value catches up. It could take over a period of 6-12 months to recoup the initial investment. Bidding wars for the number one position can drive prices to unreasonable levels. Pay what you can afford based on your cash flow and margins.

If your company has a successful business model, strong cash flow and have success in advertising, use Adwords. As your campaigns improve, the prices will go down. Adwords rewards you with lower clicks if your ads are relevant. The objective of Adwords is to give the user a good positive experience by showing relevant ads. Furthermore, you know what you can afford in your decision whether to use Adwords or not.

The ALT tag is designed to help visually impaired visitors to determine what the images contain, by allowing you to specify some alternative text. When a visitor points the mouse over an image with the alt tag, the text is shown. Search engines have the same problem as visually impaired users have, they cannot see the images. Images have no meaning to search engines. Search engines can only see the image tag’s text. Therefore it is of vital importance that you tag the images on your with their content.

Search marketers still drop links in blog comments as a way to get links. This method is considered blog spamming. To combat this, Google uses a nofollow link tags (a signal to search engine spiders to ignore a link) and devalue links in blog comments.

Search engine submission has also become unnecessary. Google has the ability to discover and index content. Search engine submission is obsolete and waste of money, not to mention automatically submitting your sites can hurt their rankings.

Unethical site owners and SEOs abuse META keywords by including misleading unrelated keywords to their content. Google ignores the keyword tag due to unethical practices.

Web site owners who practice in link exchange schemes that intentionally influence rankings is a violation of Google. Avoid methods such as link farms,off-topic links, and do not rely heavily on reciprocal links and paid links. These methods will get you penalized by the search engines.

In conclusion, do not practice unethical seo tactics. Unethical seo tactics will get your website penalized by the search engines.

Use a text browser, such as Lynx, to get a sense of how most search engine bots see your site. This exercise can help you determine where you may need to make changes for SEO. You can paste your URL in the Lynx viewer to find out how your page would look when viewed with Lynx, without having to download and install the browser.

Make sure that your site does not have duplicate content. Duplicate content can hurt your search engine ranking.

Create a XML sitemap for your web site and submit it to the major search engines; this gives the search engine bots a list of URLs on your site that you want them to index.

Shoppers visit ecommerce web sites not only to make purchases, but to gather product information, read or write product reviews etc. It is important that the site design allows the consumers to easily find what they are looking for. For example, if the customer wants to get additional product details or read reviews, there needs to be a clear path. Sites that make it easy for consumers to accomplish their goals build long-term loyalty.

Once the retailer has a well designed site, they need to address how to get visitors to the site. An Internet Retailer Survey reports that 40.2% of the respondents would like the search engines to get them visitors. This is done by a process of search engine optimization (SEO). Moreover, 27.8% of the respondents would like to have more community features, which is done by using social media.

Social media is a major source of information for consumers. A social network presence can help drive traffic back to a retailer’s site. This trend is prompting many retailers to participate in social networks and be part of that information exchange.

More consumers are using mobile devices for the holidays to find deals. According to Deloitte LLC, nearly one in five consumers are expected to use their mobile phones to assist with holiday spending. 55% of consumers planned to find store locations, 45% research prices, 40% find product information, 32% get discounts and coupons while 31% read reviews. More importantly, one in four shoppers expected to make a purchase with a mobile phone. Furthermore, the time time is now to start utilizing mobile ads in your marketing program.

Submitting your web site is a last option because you were unable to get links to your web site or your web site was blocked by the spiders. If you have to submit your web site, only submit your home page. A site map allows spiders to find everything. Many times individuals submit their sites over and over without checking to see if the spiders blocked their site.

You may receive unsolicited e-mails offering to submit your web site to thousands of search engines. These emails reference some statistics of millions of visitors that this will generate by submitting to thousands of search engines. Always avoid automated submissions. These automated submissions are considered spam and your web site can be banned for excessive submissions.

Watch Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp founder explain News Corp Sites May Be Removed From Google click www.youtube.com/watch?v=sewucH3rOPM

This can be monumental if approved. This can lead to other media companies following News Corp’s path. Bing could leverage content access rights to challenge Google.

In the late 90s, hits had no meaning at all. Pages were a more complex combination of multiple text and image files, therefore the hit metric was unable to tell you how many actual pages were viewed.

While the volume of hits is an indicator of Web server traffic, it is not an accurate reflection of how many pages are being looked at. Each time you type in your web address, the browser hits the website’s server for the document. The server sends the web page to the browser. Once the browser begins to display the information, it continues to hit the server for any additional elements needed. For example, a logo will represent one hit as the server returns that image to your browser. Because of how hits are measured, this number is inflated and different from page views or visitor counts. More images in a website leads to a greater number of hits being recorded.