I've achieved excellent SEO (search engine optimization) results by focusing my efforts on tightly defined search phrases, the top two being "web design austin texas" and "website design austin texas". Obviously the narrower your search phrase, the less competition you have to deal with.
What's much harder to do is achieve high rankings for just "web design", without any further qualifiers. You are now competing world wide with everyone who is optimizing on "web design". Further, all my efforts are focused on Google, because generally if you do well there, you will do well on MSN and Yahoo.
I track all visits to my website that come from search engines and I'm able to tell what search engine the visitor used and what search phrase was entered. Sometimes I can tell how my site was ranked just from looking at the data I receive. Other times I have go to the appropriate search engine and manually type in the search phrase that was used.
After receiving a visit that originated from the search phrase "website redesign", I entered that phrase in to MSN search and my website, http://www.austexwebsites.com/, appeared on page one of the results.
"website redesign" is not a tier one search phrase for me, but I'd still like to know what's making my site show up on page one for that phrase. Right now it's the last result on the page and could be gone at any time. I plan to watch this closely and I'll report back if I learn anything more.
