The importance of web sites for businesses is only going to continue to grow.  Think about it, what is the first thing you do when you are considering making a purchase?  Or you hear about a new company, competitor, product or service?  Most of the people I know go straight to the Internet.  Consider the following statistics:

• 82% of business decision makers use the Internet to research products and services (Jupiter Research)
• 45% spend more than 5 hours per week researching products and services (CMO Council/Knowledge Storm)
• Online ad revenue was up over 27% in 2007 (IAB/PriceWaterhouseCoopers)

These numbers are only going to increase.  Why?  Because web sites give company's the ability to present all the information a potential customer could ever want in an easy to use format.  The best part for many customers is they can research and compare from the comfort of their office or home at any time.  Web sites go beyond traditional ads in providing information in detail.  

So, what can you do to help search engines find and index your web site? Despite what some "SEO Experts" may claim, there are no easy or quick fixes when it comes to optimizing a web site for high search results.  Optimization of a web site for specific search terms is an ongoing process and requires work.  I can't go into great detail in this newsletter, but I can provide you with some basic ideas that can be easily implemented that will help get your site better indexed. 

• KEYWORDS: Develop a list of relevant or related search terms that best describe your business or service. Be specific and try to use multiple words (long-tail search) and integrate these throughout your site. It is very important to think about the words users would type to find your pages.  Test your search words and see the results each one gives you.  If you service a specific county, city, or state include that as part of your keyword strategy.
• CONTENT: Content is king!  Write content that includes your keywords and write copy that reflects what your customers call your product or service not just industry terms.  Use headlines to break copy into bite size chunks.  People do not read an entire page at first glance, try to tell your story in headlines and give greater detail in paragraphs. On the web, less is more when it comes to copy.  Keep your copy as brief and descriptive and to the point as possible. 
• PAGE URL'S: Try to use search friendly URL’s on all your pages. Try not to have any non-character symbols (?, =, !). And when possible include keywords in your URL's. 
• META TAGS: Add descriptive page titles and meta descriptions on every page of your web site and include your keywords.  The page title is what comes up at top left of your browser window.  Search engines use this information when indexing your site.
• LABEL IMAGES: Use alternate text (alt tags) to describe images and graphics on your web site. Search engines read text, not images.  "Alt tags" provides a way to tell the search engines what each image is and always try to inlcude keywords.
• SITEMAP: Include a sitemap. There are two types of sitemaps. One for visitors that shows all the pages within your site and how they are arranged and one for search engines that is an XML file that is submitted to search engines that they will use to index your site. It also alerts search engines whenever you add new content so they can come and index your site again.  All major search engines now use the same XML sitemap file to index sites.
• BUILD LINKS: Both internal and external links. Add internal text links to the most important content pages throughout your site.  If you talk about a product or service on your homepage link to the detail page.  Whenever possible have other web sites link to your web site (external links). Get links to your site from other sites that are relevant to your industry.  Try to get vendors, customers, trade associations, press releases to add links to your site. Try to get sites that are relevant to your search terms or industry.  Go to industry or trade blogs and comment on articles. But when you building external links it's important to be careful, there are a lot of services that offer to sell links.   While search engines put greater weight on natural links versus paid links, some search engines actually blacklist sites for using certain paid link farms or services.

An important point to remember is that search engines like Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask want to deliver the most relevent searches as possible about a particular subject.  Don't think that you have to optimize your entire site at once.  Pick a few keywords and work on optimizing specific pages for those keywords.  Track the results and keep tweaking them until your search results start to increase.  

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