Search Engine Optimization or SEO is one of the most important factors to consider when having a web site designed. Believe it or not, I look at web pages everyday that have been sold to companies that are graphically beautiful, but no one will be able to find them. Most companies know that a sign outside your business can cost anywhere from $1000 and up. Now imagine laying that money out and turning the sign backward so no one can see it. This is done on the web everyday and it doesn't seem to matter how much you pay. Many companies try to save money by having a friend or relative who dabbles with graphics to design their websites. Others go to sites that offer free hosting, and templates to design their own. Some will find the cheapest price and expect that they will get the 'full meal deal'. But there is a difference between having a website designed, and having a website developed complete with Search Engine Optimization. The principles are pretty basic, but take hours of detailed work to complete. Naturally, you want an attractive design that everyone wants to visit and link to, but you also need a crawl-able site architecture with keywords properly analyzed, and placed within the content to give the Search Engines some meat to chew on.

What is Search Engine Ranking and How Does it Work?

Every minute of every day, little,.programs shoot from server to server to gather information. They have been called spiders, web crawlers, and bots, just to name a few. Some servers have a few sites on them while others may have thousands. When the spider reaches your site it quickly scans though it to find information to take back to it's database or index. That information is sorted and filtered according to that search engine's rules, weeding out the duplicates and garbage. It only keeps the information that it considers to be of value. When someone does a search for something, the engine goes to work chewing up and spitting out only the most relevant information that was requested based on how it indexed the sites in the first place. Sites with valuable keywords in the content and links from other important sites get ranked higher, especially if the spider was able to recover the information quickly. Words such as 'the' or, 'and' in the title can be enough to stop the spider from wanting to look any further.

So How Does Search Engine Optimization Help?

SEO starts by creating a spider friendly environment by identifying and eliminating areas that limit the spider from checking out the full site. It also ensures that keywords that will most likely be used by the site's target audience are written logically into the site's content. Looking for ways to attract inbound links from predominant sites that people are already looking at and finally analyzing the traffic on the site. This is done carefully and meticulously over a period of time to improve the search experience for both the user and spider.  When all of this is done correctly, the search engines can do a better job of serving the searcher. The searcher finds you and everyone is happy .In the last month, I have seen customers who have witnessed the traffic on their sites increase by 200% or more and having 300 to 1000 visits per day. Meanwhile I have checked out where people have put traffic counters on their sites and it has shown that they have only had 1300 visits since 2004. Remember, regardless of how beautiful your site may be or how cheap you got it, if people can't find it, it's a waste of money.