Once again, March saw Google in the #1 Search Engine position with 72.39% of all U.S. searches.  Yahoo followed with 16.36%, and MSN came in third with 5.50%, according to Hitwise statistics.

What this means to your business is quite simple. Optimize your online presence for Google, or don’t expect much in the way of visitors.

Offline brick and mortar businesses are rapidly learning that getting listed on the #1 or #2 pages of Google for search terms other than their company name can lead to a steady stream of visitors to their websites, but more importantly, paying customers to their stores and businesses.

So what can you do to get your share?

Make your website relevant and filled with content about your product or service.  Google is in the business of leading searchers to content which is relevant to what they’re looking for. Put lots of content on your pages, and optimize each page for only one or two search terms.

Pay attention to the “on-page” optimization best practices, (even if you’ve heard that some of them don’t work anymore). Title tags, Meta description tags, Keyword tags, and Alt tags will all play a role.

Sprinkle modifiers to your core keywords throughout the body of your text. “Early and often”, is the rule of thumb. And don’t forget the end of the body text.

Don’t spam!  Times have changed.  You can no longer get away with stuffing lots of keywords onto a page and expect to rank in a prominent position on Google. In fact, this practice will likely get you adverse results.

Make your content relevant to the keywords you’re trying to rank for. Don’t optimize for “dog beds”, and have content on your page about “horse races”. This is not only misleading to the searcher, but will not provide the rankings you need.

It is estimated that the first position on page one of Google in the orgainc search listings will get around 40% of the total search traffic for that term.  Optimize correctly, and you can receive that traffic. Find yourself on page 3 or further back, and expect very little traffic, or customers.

One of the most effective optimization methods that offline businesses should be using is to target “local search” terms.
Target good keywords and then simply add your geographical location to the serch term. But won’t that provide less traffic?
Well, yest it will, but if you’re a local shoe store, aren’t you more likely to gain a customer from your city rather than another country?  Besides, you’ll have a better chance at ranking for local terms since there’s less competition.

Exercise these practices, and you’ll be plesantly surprised at the results.  Pay attention to Google, give it what it wants, and reap the benefits.
You’ll also be surprised at the number of websites that are not properly optimized.  Over 95% of all websites, your competitors can be surpassed in the search engine results, pretty quickly.

So let’s see…Google gets 72% of all searches, and you’ll get around 40% of searches in your business if in the #1 listing on page one of Google.  You do the math!