While many factors influence the rankings of a web site, any search engine optimization effort isnt worth even a second of your time without one and single unknown: relevant and competitive keywords.
Lets examine an example: a local moving company decided to optimize its website. It knows (or assumes that it does) that the most popular keywords for their type of business are movers and moving. At a first glance, looks like everythings fine: the keywords seem to be relevant, and should produce good results. However, there are two mistakes made here.
The first one is keyword relevancy. Whats the use for our local moving company of people that are looking for movers or moving in Denver, CO, Boston, MA or New York, NY, if they are located and offering services in and around San Francisco only?
Another mistake is keyword effectiveness. Itll take much more time and effort to get top rankings for such popular and competitive general keywords as moving and movers than to get same results for something more specific and relevant, such as movers San Francisco or moving San Francisco. Not only are these keywords more likely to convert visitors to buyers, but also...