The BBC News website quotes a Verdict Research report that online retailing grew by 35% in 2007 and forecast a further growth of 200% over the next 5 years - that’s around 25% a year. 

Even with the ‘credit crunch’ and recession looming,  online sales look likely to continue to grow.

These figures emphasis the importance for businesses to continue to invest in online marketing during these challenging times.

You may well have received emails offering to get your website onto the first page of Google for your chosen keywords. 

It sounds attractive but what business benefits would it give? 

If you have ever analysed your sites web stats in detail you will have noticed the very wide range of search terms that have been used by visitors to find your site. 

Often the most popular search term is your business name but then there may be hundreds or thousands of search terms that have given the site one or more visitors.  In fact, for some sites most of the visitors come from search terms that have only been used once or twice that that month. 

Even the most popular term might only give you 5 or 10% of the total number of hits. 

Consider some examples.  Will someone going on holiday search on ‘holiday’ or ‘vacation’ or ‘weekend break’ or ‘getaway’ or ‘honeymoon’ or perhaps they will search on the accommodation they require: ‘hotel’ or ‘apartment’ or ‘villa’.  Alternatively they may focus on the type of holiday: ‘adventure’, ‘golf’, ‘white water rafting’ or the less energetic ‘city break’ or ‘beach’!

And then location: is it ‘Spain’ or ‘Costa Blanca’ or ‘Alicante’ or ’somewhere near Benidorm’ or ‘Mediterranean’ or the more vague ‘within an hours drive of Alicante airport’? 

Therefore it is important that the site is optimised for a wide range of keywords.

When you review your site’s performance you should be able to find the site appearing on the first page of the search engines for many search terms not just a single keyword or phrase. 

If you are using Google Adwords or other Pay per Click (PPC) advertising, the effect is less pronounced but similar.  This is because the less effective keywords and phrases are switched off and therefore the traffic is channelled to fewer keywords.  For example, for one client recently we generated 1200 clicks from 63 keywords, with the most popular keyword accounting for just 14% of the clicks. 

If we had just focussed on the best keyword/key phrase we would have lost 86% of the site’s visitors.

In summary, for most websites there is unlikely to be a magic keyword or phrase that will generate large numbers of vistors.  

People using the search engines use a huge variety of ways to express what they are looking for and the more of these options your site can respond to the more visitors it will generate.

Internet Explorer, Firefox and other browsers can be very tolerant of programming errors in your website. 

And when you make an error it is easy to see when the browser doesn’t like it. 

However, Google and the other search engines use proprietary software to analyse web content and do not tell you when they don’t understand your website. 

This can lead to pages or sections of pages being ignored by the search engines and you are none the wiser. 

In their Webmaster Guidelines, Google advise webmasters to check that their HTML is valid.  Failure to do this can lead to poor rankings without any clear pointer to the source of the problem. 

We have recently seen a number of sites that were only partially indexed by the search engines and where the code contained numerous HTML errors.  Fixing the errors quickly improved the results. 

You can check your code at http://validator.w3.org/ - remember to check the whole site not just the home page. 

Ensuring that the HTML code on your website is valid is a essential step to achieving good rankings for the search engines.