The days of trust on the internet are gone, some might say it's never been the most trustworthy places, but in the beginning Google would trust content providers and webmasters to be truthful, and tag describe and title our pages appropriately.  Then someone at 'ACME Boring Widgets Inc' discovered that slapping XXX in his Meta Tags sent traffic through the roof.  I've never seen any evidence to suggest that the disappointed, and no doubt even more frustrated, late night surfers chose to purchase any of ACME's Boring Widgets instead, but the damage was done and trust was gone.

Even today people who know better (yes, guilty at times, old habits die hard!) take first focus on the Meta Tags, the Meta Description and the Title to be the magic key that will drive previously unknown traffic to your site, it won't, of the three maybe only the Title has weight, and even then only if it's a true reflection represented in the content that follows.  even then though the content is not enough, it's people linking to your content that counts, it's why the Google Bomb [LINK] works, and why what other people think about you is a damn site more important than what you think.

Casing example, we're based in the North East of England (Yarm, North Yorkshire (spot the keywords anyone? - yes this is the sales pitch paragraph)) and we do Web Design, the phrase 'North East Web Design' is one we're watching, but up until recently the number one hit on Google UK for that phrase didn't even have the phrase 'North East' anywhere within it's content, tags, or title, in fact on doing a backlink analysis (part of our standard service to Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing clients) we discovered that most of their inbound links didn't even have the phrase 'North East' within the anchor text (the actual words you click on as the link), only the phrase 'Web Design' but they were present in the content.  It's an extreme, and unusual example, and as it turns out they aren't number one any more a google dance has demoted them slightly, but they're still up near the top.

So what do you do?, well as we stated earlier you can't be trusted, Google, Bing, Yahoo all know what you're really saying, and adept at spotting what you're pretending to say, so our vote would be to share.  It's never been easier for you to post and publish, re-distribution to the masses is at worst a mouse click away, at best it's automated (Ping.fm, twitterfeed, HelloTxt, AddThis) and there's an audience out there (Twitter, Facebook, Identi.ca to name but a fragment), at this point you've already generated links, and an audience will come, and distribute further.  We all have a book inside of us so there's got be a blog post or article of interest in there too.  As to ACME Boring Widgets, well we'd happily take one targeted visitor looking for a Web Designer in the North East for any number of frustrated midnight surfers.  Now all you have to do is decide who to share with, another day.

dotUK are Web Design, Ecommerce, Managed Hosting and Virtualisation and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) specialists
and are based in the North East of England (Yarm, Stockton on Tees).