"I want my business to be on the first page!"

If you work in an office or own a business, the quote above is something you have certainly heard before (or maybe even said yourself). Well, we don't blame you!

Getting your business on the first pages of the major search engines accomplishes several things for your business.
1. It allows your business to be found when people are searching for a product or service that your business offers.
2. It gives your business creditability. 3. It can provide your business a source of new business that you would not have normally received.

Knowing this, it is to your advantage to position your business within the first pages of the search engines. For the most part, there are two ways to accomplish this, either Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM).  This two part series will explore both of these methods and the major components of each.  We start with Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Primarily, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process in whereby a person, employee or company organizes the information, usability and structure of your
website. While there are numerous processes (100's actually) that affect how asearch engine ranks your website, we will describe the three most basic
components.

Content:  When Internet users perform a search on a search engine such as Google, Yahoo or MSN, the search engine processes the search term (keyword) typed in and provides the user a list of websites that it feels the user would find useful. When your website has relevance to the particular search term, the search engine recognizes this and indexes your website. The search engines will index your website higher in the search results by factoring in many criteria. The most valued criteria is the content found on the pages of your website.

The content is the information a user reads and processes from your website. If the content is organized correctly on your website and it is meaningful, then the search engines make this part of the algorithms it uses to index your website. When this is done correctly, the chances of your website being listed on the first several pages of a search result increase. In essence, the better your content is on your website the more your website is rewarded by the search engine.

Links:  As you have seen on other websites, there are many instances that you will find outbound links to other websites. A search engine recognizes this and uses it as part of its evaluation of how it will rank your site. If the outbound links take the user to a website that is relevant to the content of the referring website, then this adds to the relevancy of how a search engine evaluated your site. Additionally, if other websites have your website as a link, then this is evaluated as well. The most important methodology to pay close attention with inbound and outbound links is that the referring sites are meaningful for the user of your site. In other words, do not have outbound or inbound links to websites that have nothing to do with your business.

Keep your links fresh and current with what you business has to offer. If you are able to link to a blog that is concurrent with your business, that is a great way to keep fresh content in line with your links.

Website Architecture:  When a developer or designer builds or makes changes to your website, make certain that they know the importance of the architecture of building a search engine friendly website. If your website is littered with inactive or dead links, then the spiders (or bots) that the search engines use will penalize your site for the poor structure.

Additionally, having a comprehensive site map for your website is critical in a search engines evaluation of your website. If a search engine feels that the site is poorly constructed, then they are likely to not index your site high in their rankings.  Your website must be easy for both a person to navigate as well as the search engine bots.

SEO Summary:  Search engines are extremely proactive in determining the sites that would be considered good sites for their users. They want to make surfing the web a great experience for their users for the sole reason that the users will return to use their search engine again. The more meaningful they make the search results to their users, the more likely the users will use them.

Therefore, if your business can afford the services of a competent SEO, then by all means weigh in the advantage of having your business listed organically on the major search engines in comparison to the cost.