About a year ago, I was working as an expert internet marketing consultant for a Colorado based company and I was fortunate enough to get to visit Google and talk to their account managers about our site and how we could rank better in both are paid and organic campaigns.
Of course, this company invested millions every month in Google advertising so, we got to go meet with the G boys and girls (they really all seem to be so young!)
What they told us in that meeting that stuck out for me like a second head had nothing to do with title tags, meta tags, link popularity or anything you may think really. What they told us was how much beyond how a web page is optimized the rabbit hole goes, and that the almighty Google Algorithm actually accounts for how many people come to your site without going to Google first to find it!
How do they know that? Because of the millions of Google toolbars and Google apps installed in computers the world over.
Basically, they said in pretty clear English, make your site a place where people come, hang out, refer friends to and come back without searching for it on Google and Google will reward you by giving you some very important ranking points.
Moral of the story, Google wants you to build a brand that is non Google dependant. Many website owners make the mistake of optimizing their sites to Google and not to their users. In truth, the opposite is much more likely to make your site stand out on Google. A good site that people enjoy and come back to is a site that also will get lots of links naturally. As people are impressed with your site, they will create links to it. You can also encourage them to do so of course.
The fact is that you can have a site that is NOT AT ALL optimized for Google rank high for a popular keyword. All you need is lots of links pointing to your page using your keyword and voila, you may get a good ranking. The opposite is not true however. If your site is extremely SEO friendly and optimized for your popular keyword yet there are no links pointing to it using that keyword, you won't rank high at all. Guaranteed.
With that being said, of course, working your website tags in the proper way certainly doesn't hurt, although I must say that overdoing it just a tad much might so, when thinking about spending thousands of dollars on your next Search Engine Optimization job, remember, you are not really optimizing for Google, your efforts should go in making sure you are creating a great user experience that makes your users stick and refer others. Come back to your site, type it directly on their browsers...
The way to do that isn't rocket science. Be creative. What can you offer on your site that your users would just love to have? Offer that for free. Make it easy for them to refer others to that same lure and have them come to your site for it. That is viral. People start visiting your site and it starts getting added to peoples lists of favorites. With the huge popularity of social bookmarking sites, that starts to add up and the links keep going and going naturally.
It really doesn't matter what industry you are in. If you think hard and are creative, you can certainly come up with many ideas on how to get people to love your site and along the road make Google love it too!
More Site Maintenance: 
