Sunday, October 15, 2006

Is your Website Search Engine Friendly?

You may not even know that your website was supposed to be friends with the search engines. If you want prospects to easily find you when they go to search engines, like Yahoo, Google, and MSN, then your site needs to be optimized. These search engines rank your website and the pages within your site based on a changing set of criteria. Knowing exactly what they are looking for is quite often very difficult, and often an ongoing activity.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of adding code and tags to a website with the goal of achieving a high rank on a search engine search results page when a prospect uses specific terms or phrases to find what they are looking for. Being search engine friendly is simply having a site that the search engines can find and index based on their own criteria.

There are typically 2 types of results on the main search engines; paid results and organic results. Getting listed at the top of the paid results is easy….pay more money than anyone else for that keyword phrase. Getting listed at the top of the organic results is not impossible as some Website and Internet Marketing companies claim. It could sometimes be cost prohibitive to spend the time and money it takes to achieve a top ranking.

There are some steps that you should take to make sure that your site is search engine friendly. One of the most important things you can do is to make sure each page within your website has a title that reflects the content of the page AND matches the search engine phrase you want to found when a prospect does a search. This is only one small and easy technique to get a higher ranking, but to get consistent results, you need to have an expert help you improve or maintain your rankings.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for your insights. We are trying to improve our page rank and to get as close to the top of the search results as possible. We have been working on this for almost a year and spent many hours each week. You seem to have a very good feel for what is required. We are not discouraged and have made progress. But it takes an enormous amount of time and effort.

Thanks again