Link popularity – Who links to you? The answer to this question lets the search engines know who trusts you. Who do you link to? The answer to this question lets the search engines know whether or not you are a good resource.

Social Media presence – Do you have a blog? Do you comment on others’ blogs? Are you involved in an on-line community/forum? Do you write valuable articles that others would want to republish? You need to do some or all of the above to establish yourself as an “authority” in your field. These days, this piece of the puzzle is what can give you that edge to out-rank others in your field.

Fresh, abundant content – You should develop a plan to constantly be developing more content to your site. I will recommend some areas on your current site that represent opportunities for content development.

If you approach visibility from all angles, create a plan for each of these areas and commit to investing time and budget to your plan, you have a very good chance of competing on the web.

The goal of Search Engine Optimization is to attract the search engines to pages on your website by employing some “best practices” including:

• Writing titles that are key-phrase focused, relevant to content on the page and as short as possible.

• Giving the spiders as short a distance as possible from their point of entry to the relevant content on the site. This translates into reducing “code bloat”. One of our top recommendation in the next section deals with this and how it relates to your site explicitly.

• Writing a unique description for each page that summarizes the content of the page in a couple sentences – leading with the same keywords used in the title – and ending with a marketing message and phone number.

• Writing relevant headers for each piece of content (not with identical keyword configuration found in title and description) that is searchable text and not image based.

• Putting some hypertext links within the body text of your site that leads to other related content elsewhere on your site.

• Ensuring that your address and phone number are present in searchable text in an appropriate place on each page for people who use geographic search terms but aren’t necessarily using “local search” per se.

• Usability. Many think usability isn’t an SEO issue, but it certainly is. No one knows exactly how the search engine algorithms work except some select insiders, but enough of us have been able to observe some patterns and have found that sites that focus on the end user experience do better. This does not mean that every time you run a search, the top sites will all be user friendly. It’s a factor, probably not one of the top 5 most important issues, but we have seen a steady increase in the importance of usability in search engine rankings that leads us to believe it will continue to grow in importance.

• Page names, or URL’s. It is important to name your pages from the planning stage, according to the content of the page. However, if your site has been in existence and already enjoys some search engine traffic and ranking, we suggest that you not make any changes to URL’s as it would involve considerable cost to redirect old page names to the new ones and, potentially, loss of ranking for quite some time (or none at all, but not worth the risk).

•Create a structure that:

o Has menu items titled intuitively. For example, people tend to look for an about page where you have “Our Camp” which covers About and also some other important info that perhaps should be located under section called Camp Info. See below Recommendation #1 for our interim suggestions regarding home page redesign.

o Is scalable so that your website can grow. Your structure is completely flat, which is fine for a small site. I do not recommend changing that at this time, but in future you may want to group your main menu “categories” into directories to capitalize on some SEO benefit of having more index or home pages for content groups.

o Use some two and three word page names that are key-phrase rich.

• Accessibility – use alternative text for images, video and audio presentation for those without the appropriate technology or who are handicapped and using a text reader on the web. This is another one that is becoming more and more important in a site’s ranking. Also, make sure that your alternative text represents the content and isn’t used as an opportunity to place more keywords. Just summarize as simply as possible the content that the text will be replacing.

I just read the greatest article on the Online Marketing Blog by TopRank (which I read religiously) about a keynote speech given at the Media Relations Summit by Mike Moran of IBM. The best idea from the article is that you can sip from the “web 2.0″ cup, you don’t have to drink from the fire hose. There’s a lot of new ideas out there and the whole marketing world has turned upside down, does that mean you have to put your entire business on hold and go obtain a doctorate in online marketing? No!

(It’s not that I don’t want the competition, I’m overwhelmed with business and would be very happy to share my workload.)

It’s just that you are already an expert at what YOU do. So Mike and I both recommend that you grab a single idea that intrigues you and look deeper into how you can use it. That will lead to the next step and the next in a nice, comfortable, organic fashion.

So continue to do what you do best, don’t worry about that which doesn’t excite you. If you like to write and are interested in blogging, go for it in a manner that suits your personality, work-style, comfort level and budget. Blogging just might lead you to some new ideas about viral marketing or social media networking. Or it might not.

Or if you dislike the idea of writing on a regular basis, maybe you’ve been using LinkedIn for a while now and are interested in finding out how to leverage that better.

Whatever it is, there’s a door out there for you to stumble through and you will naturally be led to the tools and techniques that will work best for you.

Along the way, be prepared to be wrong . . . a lot. So what? Just dive in and sort it out later. As Mike says, don’t over-analyze and close the door that’s open before you.

I liken this to what’s wrong in foreign language teaching in our country. We’re teaching kids who have already passed the best language acquisition stage how to speak another language and picking apart their grammar so that they can’t communicate an idea without getting a bad grade. Let them make mistakes, congratulate them for getting the idea across and learn the grammar by ear before you give them all the rules and mark up their progress with your red pen.

Internet Marketing, like learning a foreign language, can happen naturally. It doesn’t have to cramp your style!

Welcome aboard.