I've been working on a program to create a custom map using the Google API. My boss wanted a way to take building plan details and be able to place markers where we have our products installed. Along with the marker needed to be a way to note what the product was and other various details associated with it. My supervisor suggested I use the Google Maps API to accomplish this task.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a key feature to a website's success. There are numerous search engines available; Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AskJeeves are the top contenders. Search Engine algorithms (a.k.a. Search Engine Spiders) are forever evolving but there are basic standards to follow that will always be important when a search engine is indexing your site.

Relevancy

There have been numerous sites in the past that lacked design but had great Search Engine Optimization and are ranked very high for searches. The most important thing to keep in mind is relevancy. A page on your site should not veer off topic and you should repeat the keyword(s) several times within the page.
Example:
Say you have a page about family reunions. You would obviously want to entitle the page Family Reunions and within your first few paragraphs you should also use these words at least a couple of times because the first 250 words on a page get better relevancy.

No this is not a how-to, on beating the so-called "Google Sandbox". If that's what you are looking for there are plenty of forum discussions to help you out with that. What I have to offer to you is my recent and personal experience with getting a page to rank on Google.

There are professionals out there that spend every waking moment on making a page rank in the top 10 of Google (preferably #1) and for good reason. The top 3 ranking sites on Google tend to get 85% or more of the click through rates by regular web users. For terms that are searched 115,000 times a year, a site is almost guaranteed 90,000 hits per year or 2,500 hits per day. That's just for one page with one term. Just imagine what type of traffic you could get if you had 50 pages ranked in the top 3 for highly searched phrases. ALOT!