a little advice...

As the number of websites out there has quickly grown to well over three billion, website marketing has become an increasingly important function. And by the term "website marketing", I don't mean so much the marketing that takes place from a website, listing info about a company and its products, but actually the advertising and marketing efforts that take place in an effort to draw traffic to a particular website. This has become so important, that within the past few years, it has developed as an industry in itself: an industry we call Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, for short.

Since there are over three billion sites out there, what sets one apart from the rest? Pushing a particular site to the top of search engine rankings is a science that is constantly evolving, but there are some constants that hold true:

- A site's ranking is based on its popularity. That is, how many hits the site is getting. So the more hits a site gets, the higher ranked it is in search engines, so the more hits it gets. Overly simplified? Maybe. Google puts it like this: page rank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. It's sort of like voting for class president in high school. The popular vote rarely went to the one most capable of handling the duties of an office, but rather to the kid who was most well-liked.

- It’s not a crapshoot. There are things you can do to boost your site’s performance beyond making it look pretty.

Boost popularity with tags. Tags are invisible fields that web developers put inside the code behind a web page that tell search engines what the site is all about. Here they list keywords that they’d like to be associated with, a description of the website and its content, and instructions to the robotic “web crawlers” on the layout of the content on the site.

Boost popularity with content. Speaking of content, the text on the pages of a site have a lot to do with how search engines rank the site. Tags can be deceiving, whether done so intentionally by the site’s designers or not, and search engines realize that the content on a site is a better indicator of what the site is all about than is what a designer says the site is all about.

Boost popularity by creating a buzz. Stirring up interest, creating noise out there about your site can be done by writing internet articles, blogging, linking from other popular sites, etc. The more “noise” there is out there, the better for your rankings, even if you’re only creating the noise yourself. Others will follow.

Boost popularity by advertising. Old fashioned advertising can help as well. TV spots, newspaper articles – anything that drives traffic to the site from multiple sources will help. After all, if it’s popular with readers, it’s popular with search engines.

Keep a site under constant analysis. Making a site stand out can be a chore, and can demand lots of time, and time usually means money. Since business managers are usually not web developers, it often makes sense for them to hire an expert in the field of SEO. It’s important to view SEO in the long-term rather than the short-term. A SEO campaign can take up to four, six, even eight months before results are noticeable, but the traffic that ensues can make it all worthwhile.

It sounds like a sales pitch, but SEO can truly drive traffic to your website, and lack of SEO can leave a beautifully functional website old and dusty.

there are several ways you can improve your search engine rankings yourself, and we've listed several free and low-fee tools. if you're ready for a professional touch, SEO is one of the web services we offer, so please let us know if we can help in any way.

Rob Riggs
principal, creative director
ydo, ATLANTA