Seach Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips

Tip #2 - The importance of having a Website Map / Index - Sitemap

Even the best and most popular Search engines of today cannot understand advanced scripting languages or dynamically generated web pages. Open a copy of your website in a text based web browsers like Lynx and whatever you see is exactly what a search engine can see. Images, Flash based videos, animations, dynamic content etc are all invisible and uninterpretable by a search engine. A sitemap is a text based listing of all the links available on a website. Given that you do not have a GUI based web browser you can use the sitemap to navigate the entire website. This is what is exactly done by a search engine if you have created a sitemap for your website. Search engine like Google even allow adding a sitemap of your website additionally to help the search engine understand your website better. Consider having a sitemap for your website. Nowadays many advanced Joe web surfers use sitemap to get to the required web page if the website size is more than 10-15 web pages.

Seach Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips

Tip #1 - Ethical Link Building - Doing Business the Internet Way!

Creating links and long lasting relations is an important goal of any business. Google's page rank is modeled on a similar concept of link building and believes in creating a trusted relation between web pages. "Ethical" link building is the key. This can be done in various ways for e.g. link to businesses that are in similar industry vertical but have customers geographically separated for e.g. a Florida Attorney could exchange website links with a California Attorney. Unethical link building involves creating mirror sites, duplicate sites or any type of fraudulent ways of tricking the search engines. Search engines are very strict and can blacklist your website which may result in Google not at all indexing your website. Such practices are referred to as BlackHat SEO. Be careful in hiring a SEO consultant. 'FREE submissions to 40 or 100 search engines' type of consultants could be one of them.

Another way to achieve better page rank through link building is to link abundant resources to your website in the form of good blogs, articles (or web pages) that people are searching more frequently on the Internet. Google's link hungry crawler would love such websites!!

Managing your identity on the Internet

Market research indicates that there is an increasing trend of customers using the Internet for connecting with businesses and willing to spend online. As customers spending online increases by 30-40% each year and doing business on the Internet gets more competitive, businesses see tremendous potential towards improving user experience, effectively market their products and establish better communication channel with customers online to boost Internet sales and promote their products/services. A good service complemented through a good marketing and promotion strategy creates a level of trust among the customers.

Just a website is no longer seen as a complete Internet presence but also needs to be complemented with the right marketing tactics to make it visible to the order of billion search queries that Internet users fire on a daily basis looking for businesses online. It is very important to channel your customers to your business website before they can make an attempt to even view your services. This huge gap is accomplished through SEO*, SEM**, advertisements in Local Search pages (for e.g. Yahoo Local ) or through vertical search engine marketing (a term coined for search engines dedicated for specific industry verticals like Lawyers.com )

Once you accomplish the important task of bringing the customer to your website the next task is to make your website more transparent i.e. use Toll FREE numbers, or free calling through click to talk or click to chat through which customers can chat with your customer support executives online and get all business queries answered. This works exactly as how you would go to a store and talk with a store keeper or manager for the service you are looking for. The difference here is that you are talking on a web store and your website is serving as a strong communication channel between you and the customer. This "We are here to help you" approach and concern for the customer's need brings trust and confidence in the customer.

SEO* - Search Engine Optimization
SEM** - Search Engine Marketing