Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the abbreviation for a commonly offered website development service, Search Engine Optimization. While Search Engine Optimization sounds like a daunting process, it means in its simplest definition, to make your website's content digestible to search engine spiders and/or robots.

Important things to consider when deciding whether or not to hire a firm to perform SEO on your website:

• 47% of shoppers use search engines to find products on-line. Media Metrix (Sep. 2001)
• 78% of browsers find pages through Search Engines eMarketer (Nov. 1998)
• Browsers give up after 12 minutes of fruitless searching WebTop (April 2001)
• 33% of all search engine users believe that the top positioned website is the number one brand in that industry (Voter.com)
• Compared to direct mail, acquiring a customer through search engine marketing is 35 times less expensive.
• Google, the world's most popular search engine, is queried 200 million times a day. Nielsen//NetRatings (2003)

The result of the above statistics is obvious, if you are not ranked by search engines and indices, you will not be found by the 100's of millions of potential customers that do business on the web. No matter how aesthetic your website is, if it is not developed with an eye toward search engines, your website will not succeed.

The Search Engines that Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc… have developed are VERY SOPHISTICATED. There is not necessarily one technique that can make your score better than another; rather, it is the web site’s whole “package”. These companies are doing “data mining” using tools they’ve developed known as “search engine spyders”. A Search Engine is judged by the public as being worthy and of value with the quality of items they return from their Search Engines, with the highest score web sites first (i.e. the score is in descending order). It is this “data mining” and the various “scoring” techniques they use that makes these companies Search Engines of value, therefore, the “data mining” methods and “scoring” methods are proprietary to that company (i.e. they are company secretes and are assets of that company.).

That is where “SEO”…. Search Engine Optimization techniques come into play. These are techniques webmasters can employ to make “search engine spyders” work more effectively for everyone. Search the Internet and Wikipedia using those words (i.e. SEO) to learn more about it. The search engine companies do want to inform the “webmasters” as how to prepare their site for effective “data mining”, because they want the public to be satisfied.

Below is a link where Google describes to some depth to Webmasters, how to structure and code their web site so that Google can score it correctly and more effectively for their Search Engine use.

Google Webmaster Guidelines

When your new website is developed, we will then recommend we go through the SEO process. We will have Google and the others evaluate your site for quality and SEO.