Search Engine Optimization.

You've probably heard of Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others. These are the big players in the search engine business and millions upon millions of people use them every day to find everything from stock tips to sports cars. Google alone boasts over 200 million searches every day, and that number keeps on growing. Even if you've never thought about search engines before, these statistics illustrate how important it is for your website to be listed in them. But being listed isn't enough; you also need to achieve a high ranking in the search results to benefit from the considerable amount of traffic they can send to your website.

Organic Search Marketing

In the midst of this economic downturn, business development for SEO becomes increasingly important. As an agency or consultant providing marketing advice to clients, you're missing a crucial opportunity to provide long-lasting ROI at a still relatively cheap cost if you aren't pushing for investment in organic search.

What is Organic Search Marketing?

Organic search marketing, known as search engine optimization (SEO), is the process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for the appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.

How Does It Work?

Crawler based search engines, such as HotBot, Google, MSN and Yahoo!, "crawl" the Web by means of a "Web spider". The spider is a powerful computer program that accesses thousands of Web pages and records what it finds. It possesses a level of intelligence, allowing it to make fairly sophisticated judgements on relevancy and store the information in its database. When you search one of these systems, you're actually searching the records in the spider's database.

The spiders operate constantly on the Web. Once your site is on a spiders list, it will receive periodic re-visits, and so any changes to your client's site will get recorded on the search engines. Page titles, body text and other elements all play a role in how the page is given relevancy.

Crawler Based Search Engines Use the Spiders To Do Three Things:

• It visits the Web page
• It then follows links to other pages within the site
• It then returns to the site on a regular basis to identify site changes

The information the spider finds goes into the "index". The index is a huge electronic list containing a copy of every Web page that the spider finds. If a website changes, the index is updated with the new information. These updates can take a while sometimes. The time between being spidered and indexed can be several months. Until the site is indexed, it is not available to any searchers. Because of this fact, WSI Consultants find it crucial to submit to the search engines as soon as the site has been launched.

What Does SEO Do For Online Businesses?

• Increase rankings in major search engines
• Improve volume of quality traffic
• Increase brand awareness and recognition

Have you ever wondered why some sites turn up at the top of any given search result while others are buried 10, 20 or 100 pages down?

There are specific techniques used when building a website that can determine whether or not a search engine can actually find the website to begin with, and then where it ranks that site in its database. These techniques are referred to as search engine optimization (often abbreviated as SEO) and are really quite complex. That's because searchers demand only the most relevant results from their searches, so the search engines are constantly changing and refining the way they capture and categorize content. It takes an expert to understand this constantly evolving process and to implement the techniques that ensure a top ranking. Your Internet Consultant can offer these expert SEO services as part of your new Internet Solution, or as an upgrade to your existing website. Either way, this essential service will deliver more targeted traffic to your website, unlocking the full potential of your online presence.

To discuss a traffic (and profit!) generating SEO program for your website, Contact a WSI SEO Specialist to begin optimizing your website!