Do You Need Search Engine Optimization For Your Site?

The main reason for posting a commercial website, or any website for that matter on the Internet is to draw people to that site, either to provide information or to sell a product, or both.

The only way people will come to your website is for you to make it possible for them to find it. You can do this via massive advertising campaigns, pay-per-click campaigns or have the browsers direct people to your site who are looking for certain information you have to offer.

Advertising your site, or pay-per-click campaigns provides more immediate results in the form of visitors to your site, but it can become very costly. Usually when you stop advertising or stop paying for clicks, the traffic to your site drops dramatically, or stops altogether.

Optimizing the structure and content of your site in such a way that browsers currently prefer, will eventually get your site listed in these browsers. You can also submit your site to these browsers yourself, if you do not want to wait for them to discover your site by themselves. This is the obvious thing to do of course.

Optimizing your site for search engines, and getting it listed or indexed does take more work and will take longer to get results (i.e. traffic), but once you are listed and hopefully traffic starts coming in, it will not require you to spend fistfuls of dollars to keep the traffic going.

It is highly recommended to analyze and test where and how this traffic is generated. You do this by modifying the various parameters of your site to see if can improve on the way the search engines perceive and rank your site, and hopefully send more traffic your way.

The amount of traffic you can receive from search engines largely depends on the ranking of your site within that search engine. What everybody is aiming for of course is to be listed at the top, or at least at the top half of the first page that is displayed when someone is searching for a particular word or phrase. Most people will not scroll down the listing of website links for more than one or two pages – on average about 10 links – before deciding which link to click on. If your sites happens to be listed on page 25 for that search word, chances are very small to nil that anybody will ever see the listing of the link to your site, and to ever get any traffic from that search word.
That is where optimization becomes important.

How to optimize your site.

You need to go through the lengthy process of changing each and every parameter of your site, and wait to see if there is any change in the ranking of your site in the search engines. This may take some time, since you never know when these engines come back to interrogate your site again for re-evaluation.

Some of the parameters you can change on your site are:

- Keywords
- Meta-tags
- The organization of the site
- The relevance of the information or articles to the product you are selling
- Your sales pages and their titles
- The number of links to, and particularly from other websites etc.

The list is long since this is by no means a complete list, and consequently the testing process will be very long.

You could hire a professional to do all this testing and tweaking for you, but this could become very expensive. It may set you back many hundreds or even thousands of dollars. A much more affordable solution would be to purchase software that will do all the work for you at a price that is dramatically lower than the price of hiring a consultant.

There is some excellent Search Engine Optimization (SEO) software available, which will do most of the work for you and takes a lot of the guesswork out of the optimization process. The increase in traffic, and the resulting increase in sales will easily pay back the purchase price in a very short time.

Bill Stafford has been operating a computer sales and support company for over 20 years. For more information and tips on the use of your PC or the Internet, visit his site at:  http://inforesources.wordpress.com/