Moving on to "cheap airfare," who comes to mind? I think of Southwest Airlines, Air Tran Airways, and Frontier Airlines. However, I found only one brand ranking on the first page of Google for the term "cheap airfare" -- Spirit Airlines. The company optimizes its homepage for "cheap tickets," "cheap flights," "discount airfare," "cheap hotels," "cheap car rentals," and "cheap travel."

Ironically, the unlikely airline brand to feature the best on-page optimization for frequently searched keyword sets that contain the term "cheap" is American Airlines. Strategically, this is a great move.

This AA.com page is optimized for "cheap flights," "cheap travel deals," and "cheap air fare." The company increases the thematic relevance (a Google best practice) by weaving in synonymous text in the marketing copy such as "sales," "deals," "values," "discounts," and "special offers." The Google terminology for how synonyms affect the search engine results of web pages is called "latent semantic indexing," and Jeffrey Smith of SEO Design Solutions reveals a sweet little tactic to identify synonyms in the eyes of Google in this blog post.

Despite all this effort, AA.com drops the ball by serving pages with dynamic URLs, thereby preventing them from ranking in Google. I can't stress enough to brand marketers and virtual IT techs how important it is to rewrite dynamic URLs to appear static to the search engine robots. Search-engine-friendly URLs will make or break your search engine rankings, and AA.com fails to rewrite the URLs for its JavaServer Pages (JSP).

One other note here: AA.com's audience searches for "airfare," not "air fare."