Just starting Day 2 at IMC conference and wanted to share a few nuggets in Internet Marketing.  This from Gary Beal of UK’s Sticky Eyes.  Gary impressed the audience with his expertise and quick wit one of my favourites so far.  Why does SEO matter well Gary shared how Position 1 on google is worth a 40% click-thru, position 5 is only 4%!  More on writing for web later.

Top 10 Tips

1. Make sure your page titles optimized for search – start with primary and move to longtail (e.g. Honda Prelude vs. cars).  Check out Hittail and log file analyzer – great free tools.
2. Optimize internal link structrure and use Nofollow to boost positions and kick start new nice and longtail phrases – called link sculpting.
3. Start with link juice (like about us) and spill over primary key words through to secondary ones.
4. Use external linking wisely – link to top sites.  Definitely link back if you have a link from a top site.
5. Write your content with a LSI (latent semantic indexing) and LSA (Latent Semantic analysis) focus to plan for future tech.  Use social bookmarking, forums and blogs.
6. Check for common mistakes and penalties.  Xenu is a great tool to find broken links.
7. Check your internal canonicalization yourwebsite.com or www.yourwebsite.com   - do this by checking yahoo .  Make the one (most backlinks) primary.
8. Install multiple tracking to follow keywords to conversion.
9. Bump your competitors to rank higher.  If a non-competitor ranks, help submit their url to blogs to bump the buffer you have. 
10. Optimize your 404 page – it may actually rank for you.  Get your page out to supplemental/omitted results.

http://www.stickyeyes.com/news/seo-tips-2007/