Website Development & Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Designing and building a website is only one aspect of bringing your business online. With billions of websites on the Internet, it’s just as important that you ensure people can find your website. And, since most website traffic still comes from search engines and directories – 98% of Internet users claim they use search engines regularly – you may want to focus your initial web marketing efforts on search engine optimization.

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo index billions of web pages and rank them according to complex algorithms that assess a page’s accessibility, its relevance based on specific search terms or keywords, and importance indicated by the number of sites that link to it.

Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the work that is done to a website to ensure it gets noticed and ranked highly by search engines. Ideally, you want to strive for a top ten ranking, because studies have shown that most search engine users don’t scroll past the first page of results.

Keep in mind, SEO is not an exact science, and as such, SEO specialists often use slightly different methods. That said, generally, SEO includes:

• Building a website using “search engine friendly” coding techniques that minimize the use of Flash and frames
• Researching appropriate search terms – called “keywords” or “keyword phrases” – that fit the target market
• Incorporating keyword-rich content into a website’s domain name, meta tags, title tags, alt tags, headings and overall content, and ensuring that content is updated regularly.
• Submitting the website address to search engines
• Developing a reciprocal linking strategy with other websites to grow quality inbound links to the site