I attended a seminar last year offered by one of googles partners on how to be successful with adwords..but also how to rank higher with organic listings. We have a 300 page + static HTML site.. To see if what i learned in this seminar worked.. I spent a good month editing in notepad all our our Title tags, Meta Descriptions, and also meta keywords. people say that google doesn't use keywords or meta tags..i disagree. i have found that the meta descriptions and the content on the site both get indexed by the search engines. I optimized the title tags for each page with the product names of the products we are selling,..and on the same pages, I edited all of the meta descriptions to focus more on geography.. example.. if someone is looking for widgets I made the title tag look like this: Widgets | Custom Sizes| Stock Colours | Widgets | 1-800-xxx-xxxxx Then in the meta description, I put something like: Widgets: Custom Widgets for sale, bulk or wholesale, buy in Vancouver, Calgary, Seattle, Portland...etc." You get the idea. For our business, this worked as most of our potential customers when searching on the internet, type in the name of the product, and the city they are looking for a store in. It has been almost 1 year now.. it was hard work changing all of the title and meta tags..The results? Our website traffic is 500 percent higher than what is was last year this time...and we are getting more and more orders.
Excellent results! Only goes to prove that if you put in the effort to make your sites/pages customer friendly AND SE friendly at the same time, the returns are great. Kev