Steamrolling ahead, here’s #4! In brief, again, to re-reiterate, I’ve provided these search tips during some recent presentations and they were well-received by the participants. I thought it would be beneficial to post them here. I hope they’re able to help you with your search efforts.
Top 10 Search Tips – Tip #4 – Do Something, Anything. 
I used to call this tip “Don’t SCI Corp”. I can’t remember from where I learned about SCI Corp but I do remember the impact it had on me. Hopefully they’ve mended their ways by the time you read this but, for now, if you type “funeral and cemetary services” into your favorite search (or “decisioning” as MS calls Bing) engine, you won’t see SCI Corp anywhere in the first three pages of results. This is true even though, if SCI’s marketing copy is to be believed, they are one of the largest providers of funeral and cemetary services in the US. If you go to www.sci-corp.com and take a peek at the source code for the site, you’ll notice the basics of search, much less any structure, is breathtakingly absent. Maybe they don’t want the home website to result as well as their individual locations or brands.
Whatever the reason for the absence of search optimization, it’s a great example of what not to do if you want any results from search. At the very least, populate Title (for every page) and Description (for the home page) tags. While it’s not supposed to matter, go ahead and complete a keyword list as well. The only way it can hurt is that your competition can see exactly what keywords you’re supposedly targeting.
And to the webmaster for SCI-Corp, sorry if I rained on your party over there. But, really, populate some tags!
Tags: Search Marketing, Search Marketing Activity, Search Marketing Testing, Top Ten Search Marketing Tips