Great news! You just got your brand new state-of-the art website designed and ready for the world to see. Now What? How are they going to find the site? What do you mean my site needs to be search engine friendly, can’t I just throw it up on the web and they will come?

Welcome to the crash course in Internet Marketing and Advertising. Before we get started there is one term you should be familiar with.

SEO – Stands for search engine optimization. What is SEO? Well there are many things to take into consideration. First and foremost the old adage, “content is king”, still applies. Robust search engine friendly content is a must, but that content has to be enjoyable by both search engine and the end user who visits your website and wants to read about your company. Your content needs to be fresh, regularly updated and relevant. By relevant, we mean the content really needs to apply to your company. For example, let’s say you sell widgets (yeah I know this has been overdone a million times) but you decide to put a news post up on your site about your dog rover and his late night escapades in the local neighborhood. Not really relevant to widgets.

However, before you even begin writing how your search engine and visitor friendly information, your website has to be programmed correctly (that’s our job for sure). See when a search engine such as Google, sends out there little web bots to scour the internet for new and exciting websites, it first looks at the structure of how it was built. There are certain quality elements it looks for and if they are not present or they are not correct you will be just skipped over and your newly built website will hardly be visited. So we make sure that under the hood, everything is running smoothly and all the parts are functioning correctly before we even sit down with you and help you generate search engine friendly content

Last but not least are links to your website. Inbound links are VERY important in search engine ranking. A search engine basically looks at how many links to your website you have that come from relevant sources. The more credible and relevant inbound links to your website the better. Search engines view these inbound links as indicators that your website is useful to people and is a credible source of information. So again, if you sell widgets, you want as many inbound links form other companies that deal in some way with widgets. Chances are you will not get inbound links form other widget competitors, but you can get inbound links form other companies who have purchased your widgets, the company who helps manufacture your widgets, customer reviews on other sites that sell your widgets, articles that have been posted about your widgets on other websites INCLUDING blogs. Blogs, forums and article related websites could be a huge advantage to your inbound link count.

So now you have a general idea what search engine optimization is all about. Well almost. Once we have your website optimized we then need to submit it to the appropriate search engines, wait for the search engines to index your website and finally monitor your website to see how well it is ranking. Ideally you want a number 1 listing on any search engine and we would love to get you there. Unfortunately in the SEO business there are no guarantees. We will work hard with you and on our own to get your website ranked as high as possible based on your keywords as they are relevant to your company.

Getting to number one is a daunting task and in some cases, based on the amount of competition, practically impossible. A lot goes into an algorithm to determine where your website is ranked. Each search engine such as Google, Bing, Yahoo etc have their own algorithm that indexes your website. Optimizing correctly for all of them to get a #1 rank is out of the question, but optimizing your website to land within the first page or two on all the search engine is a reality.