Making the Most of Your Personal

For businesses of any size, making the most of their Internet presence is always a challenge. That’s because the Internet landscape is always changing. By the time you’ve figured out how to build a website with HTML, you find out that it’s better to have cascading style sheets, or a flash intro, or no flash intro.



And having a really great, interactive website is great, but if no one knows it’s there, you might as well not have a site at all. Most of your customers are probably using Google to find sites like yours. But how do you drive traffic to your website? And how do you get one of those coveted top positions in a Google search?



Those are the billion dollar internet marketing questions these days. And the billion dollar buzz words that go with those questions are Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In short, SEO is the science of figuring out how to tailor the content of your web site so that it will pull up in one of the top slots in a Google search. On its face, it sounds quite simple. If you’re a plumbing supply company, just load up your web site with the words "plumbing supplies" and you should shoot straight to the top, right? Wrong.



SEO is the very definition of computer science. While it sounds simple, it’s actually quite complex. That’s because search engine companies like Google use complex mathematical formulas called algorithms to determine what’s useful content and what’s just filler, i.e. "plumbing supplies" repeated over and over.



There are other factors that the algorithm considers as well, such as proximity of search terms. If an article still reads like an article but includes the search terms in every sentence, it will adversely affect the site’s rankings.



Another major factor effecting ranking is how many times an article is linked to from other web sites. This helps to authenticate an article’s quality and authenticity. This is why many companies encourage their employees to blog. Blogs can link to the company web site and the web site can link to the blogs.



If you’re doing it yourself, start out by Googling the search terms you think you’ll need and seeing what comes up. At the end of the day, understanding SEO is challenging and you may need a dedicated SEO firm to help you get started.



But if you really want to drive traffic to your company’s web site, SEO something you should definitely understand.