Did you know that search engine and directory searches account for 80 % of Internet traffic? A study conducted by Booz-Allen, a leading strategic management and consulting firm, revealed that less than 10% of websites are found using search engines or directory searches. How confident are you that your site is being found in the major search engines and directories?



An increasing number of businesses are incorporating Search Engine Optimization (SEO) into their marketing strategy to ensure that the site, into which they invested a significant amount of money, receives high ranking in search engines and is prominently visible to potential customers.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving your site's ranking in search engines by incorporating key components. These critical elements must be readable by the search engine in order for the site to be included in their database, and must be relevant to your website in order to achieve a high ranking. When planning for SEO, it is critical to find an ethical SEO specialist who does not use blacklisted techniques that could result in your site being banned from major search engines.

Here are several points that you should consider when selecting a SEO provider:

Experience & Knowledge:

Optimizing a website is an on-going process and not a one-time solution. Accordingly, a reputable SEO provider will have an on-going strategy, establish matrixes to measure success, and have a commitment to your website. It is important to look for an SEO provider that is experienced in optimizing sites across various industries and is up-to-date with SEO strategies and industry changes.

Your SEO company of choice should not work for your competition, so be sure to ask about their other clients and get references.

Accomplished SEO specialists have an in-depth knowledge of how search engine spiders index HTML, and will spend a great deal of time on keyword research. The keyword research should be shared with you for your review, and the provider should work with you to incorporate the keywords into the page context and not just add the words in the metatags section. In addition, the specialist should hold frequent update meetings with you to review your site's current ranking and provide recommendations to increase your site's ranking.

Strategies:

Reputable providers will educate you on the difference between search engines (ex. Google) and directories (ex. Yahoo). If an SEO provider describes Yahoo as a search engine, keep looking for someone else. In addition, the SEO provider should have two separate promotion strategies for each: one for the search engines and one for the directories.

Until relatively recently, title tags and metatags with relevant keywords gave decent rankings. However, after years of tag misuse, search engines now attach more importance to:

· Page content

· Site design (for example, spiders do not process JavaScript or images)

· Incoming links and authoritative status of referring sites

Ethical Behavior, Software and Blacklisting:

Search engines want to ensure that the indexed page is the page the user will visit.

Otherwise, the index has effectively been spammed. Unfortunately, programmers violate this principle by utilizing several techniques such as:

· Writing a cloaked page that is invisible to the user. This artificially boosts rankings by detecting and re-directing search engine spiders. Google will blacklist sites identified using this technique.

· Creating doorway and bridge pages that work the same way as cloaked pages, but are stored on external servers.

· Hosting gateways which re-direct users to a different website. This can indicate the use of software to generate high-ranking gateways; this is considered spamming and frowned upon.

· Stuffing keywords on a page by repeating the words several times in a row, using invisible text, or text so small that it is barely legible.

Guarantees:

Search engines frequently change their algorithms, web sites come and go, and rankings will always fluctuate. There is no guarantee that, with search engine optimization, your site will rank higher, unless you are participating in a pay-per-click campaign. If a specialist guarantees you a high ranking in search engine results, find someone else.

Pay-Per-Click Management:

The SEO specialist you select should have experience with Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns.

PPC allows you to purchase your ranking on specific keywords or phrases. PPC ranking is determined through bidding with rates varying from a few cents to several dollars per click. This approach is often recommended to compliment organic optimization for highly competitive sites (ex. apparel or electronics).

Summary:

SEO should be incorporated early in site design and not as an afterthought. Incorporating SEO early will save you time and money before the site goes live and is first submitted to search engines and directories.

Internet Marketing Terminology:

Blacklisted: using techniques that will result in your website being dropped from an index

Cloaking: hiding the content of the page

Crawling: term used to describe spiders when they navigate from page to page and site to site.

Directory: collection of websites that are usually complied manually and offer higher quality search results through a defined editorial selection process.

Doorway/ Bridge Page: a page designed to rank high for a specific keywords and redirect visitors to another, page which has the actual content

Index: database of web pages

Invisible Text: is visible to search engines but not the human eye (ex. white text on a white background)

Keyword Stuffing: excessively repeating keywords in metatags and/or content (ex. orange, orange, orange, orange…)

Metatags: data in the HTML header that provides additional information which is not viewable on the page by is used by search engines.

Ranking: the overall position of a page in search engine/ directory results ased on a specific search query.

Search Engine: a website that enables users to locate information on the World Wide Web based on specific by entering keywords. The search engine will provide a list of sites to the user which contain the information sought

Spamming: deceitful techniques that increase the potential ranking of a site

Spiders/Robots: automated program that visits and stores web pages in the search index.

Title Tags: the title of the page as specified in the HTML data