People tend to forget that behind every visit to your site there is a human being and whether you like it or not they will form their own opinion of your website in just 10-15 seconds. I know I can spot a real gem when I see one on any subject matter. Since my work involves a lot of research of some type, finding information fast is crucial to what I do. Every site has a certain characteristics that tells you within the first few second if you are on the right place or just wasting your time. I don’t know how many times a day I hit the back button on my browser window to bail out of sites that offer nothing useful or it’s not the answer I am looking for.

Is it the fault of the search engines that they didn’t pull out of their billion page index the 10 best sites that match my query? I would like to blame Google for missed hits and irrelevant search results, but than again what am I thinking, Google is just a bunch of networked supper computers that are as the dumb as my kitchen table without the search logic that’s built into them.

So, despite the best search algorithms Google, Yahoo and MSN will miss the boat more often than not.

As SEOs we see our job as gently nudging the search engines in the directions of our clients sites for the keywords they want to be on the first page for. The real trick of SEO is to figure our which one of the 100 or so factors Google will give the most weight to, and concentrating our efforts on those.

Our guaranteed SEO relies on the past experiences to gauge which link popularity or on page SEO tweaks will give us the biggest bang for the buck. Since we only get paid if actually push our SEO clients’ site to the top 10 on Google we can’t waste our resources on techniques that only achieve marginal results.

From our experience so far this is what works for sites on Google that are on the second page of the SERPs or lower for moderately competitive keywords, that’s about 100,000 result or less for the exact keyword phrase (meaning keywords in quotes like this “seo software”).

Content Optimization:

1. Create unique title tags for each page and match title with the content’s target keyword phrases
2. Review and optimize the internal linking scheme and current anchor texts
3. Add a site map if it’s missing
4. Encourage the owner of the set up a blog
5. Update the existing content with some fresh new pages and link to them

Link Building:

1. Write at least 2-3 new articles and distribute them to the top 5 ezine sites. You should consider Ezinearticles.com, Articlecity.com and Articlealley.com
2. Add the site to DMOZ.org and the Yahoo directory if not already listed. The Yahoo listing is pricey at $299 per year, but well worth it.
3. Find 5-10 niche or regional directories that matches the site’s content and submit. Submission costs range from Free to $200 per listing.
4. Buy/Secure 20-40 new one-way permanent links from sites with a minimum of PR 3 that are least 50% related. Expect to pay $15-$25 for each link.
5. Buy/Secure 5 top quality permanent links from authority domains that are closely related to the target site. Expect to pay $300-$500 per link.

Of course keep in mind there are always exceptions and a great deal depends on the keywords’ competitiveness. If you have done any SEO, you should already know there is a big difference between lifting a site to the top from say number 100 on Google for a keyword phrase like “home loans” vs. “Florida term life insurance”.

In a recent post on Flahsinsider.com, there is an interesting note about Google starting to index and allow searching of flash files. I thought I give it a whirl on Google, by typing Flash “filetype:swf keyword” and sure enough the flash content is searchable.

This can be a great benefits to all flash based web sites, wanting to get some search engine traffic without a complete redesign of their web sites, or resorting to creating static html pages in addition to their flash content.