[Yek]

If you search on Google you will find a number of different websites that can create keywords from a short phrase.
This may provide useful for your meta tags.

One site I found that may be particually useful.
Keyword Generator (Google Suggest Tool)

Cheers,

~ Tkey

[NetCablesPlus]

By the way, I remain open but skeptical of SEO and SEM (paid advertising on search engines) as a cost effective way to generate the type of local business that you need. I sell my network and PC cable products only in North America (they are not as cost effective to ship internationally) and at least I have the ability to limit my AdWords campaign to just the US and Canada, but you really cannot limit the geography further. I can justify SEO work because so much traffic comes in from the U.S., that I don't mind the additional traffic from around the world that I am 'paying' for in SEO fees.

In your case, I would seriously consider other forms of marketing (more locally oriented marketing) before I worried about the search engines.

[Moppers]

It's possible to compensate for a lack of links to a degree. Use all of the search engine optimization tricks listed above and you'll probably be able to beat pages that have more link popularity but are badly optimized. However, when your competitor has 6,000 on-topic links and you have six, no amount of optimization is going to make you pass him in the search results.

Thus, you'll need to build links in every way you can think of. Exchange reciprocal links, encourage your visitors to link to you, write newsletter articles and so on. Just try to make sure that when someone links to a page on your site, the link text includes your most important keyword. One more reason to include keywords in the headings and titles of your pages.

[Mak213]

Moppers,

IT doesnt matter how many links a site has. I have had sites that were on top of others that were much larger. With Google it is the amount of clicks a site gets. Not how many links that site has.

Cheers,
Mak

[Yek]

Originally Posted by Mak213

Moppers,

IT doesn't matter how many links a site has. I have had sites that were on top of others that were much larger. With Google it is the amount of clicks a site gets. Not how many links that site has.

Cheers,
Mak

Actually Mak, inbound links are VERY important
Google bases it's rankings on the number of inbound links the site has, hence the win over other SE's such as Yahoo and Ask!

On the flip side however inbound links from low P.R sites and/or bad websites has been know to reduce your ranking.

I'm not sure if you were talking about inbound OR outbound links, however both are very important in optimization for Google. Other SE's however (such as Ask!) are very keyword based and don't place so much emphasis on independentt rankings of inbound links.

Cheers,

~ Tkey

[Mak213]

Tkey,

that seems odd. As i have had my former site at the top of some google searches for items when i had very few hits with other topics. Maybe it was because i had a lot of traffic for some things and not others. but i know i had some major sites beat out with a few of my topics.

Meh learn something new everyday.

Cheers,
Mak

[Yek]

Yes, that would be the flip side. The major sites would have large inbound links from both highly and low ranked (P.R) site's.
Having a few links from high ranked sites (possibly yours) in Google's eyes is more useful than having hundreds of links from probably low ranked sites (warez etc)

If you take a large website, with hundreds of inbound links and yours had virtually no inbound links except perhaps one or two on very high traffic, high content, highly ranked sites such as the BBC you would be possibly placed higher in the results (thus gaining inbound links from the BBC proves practically impossible )

Cheers,

~ Tkey

[Athlon]

try adding keywords such as the areas you work in or other similar businesses in the area that could be something like Fencing or whatever, something else that someone could be looking for but then your site pops up and they think "oh, while im at it, i'll have a look here". Might be worth it in the long run, like an impulse buying sort of technique, sometimes works

You don't have to add yourself to Google to be found, over time you will appear in search results anyway without having to worry about signing up for Adwords etc

[Gigos]

Nowadays, everyone knows that it is counterproductive to use hidden text on your website. By hidden text, I mean text that is included in the main body of your web page but is not actually displayed on the screen when visitors view your page in a browser. In days of old, some unscrupulous webmasters used such text to add keywords to a web page to influence search engine results. Search engines try to deal with that tactic by not showing pages which they think contain hidden text.

[coolbrze]

Here's my website, tell me what you think I should do:

Four Brothers Tree & Landscaping

I used Frontpage to set it up. One thing, on the photos page I don't think flickr is very professional and what I want is when someone clicks the photos link, for a new window to pop up w/ 1.5" x 1.5" thumbnail pics to be displayed. Then they can click on any pic and the pic will pop up in a new window to full-size. Any other recommendations are greatly appreciated.