A Web site belonging to a small or midsize business can evenly compete with sites belonging to larger companies -- if it is properly optimized for visibility by Google, Yahoo, and other search engines
In the good old days of the Internet -- before Googling became a verb -- getting the word out online about your small or midsize business involved throwing up a Website and hoping search engines would find it.
What a difference a decade makes. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a the practice of designing or modifying a web site so that it is more visible to search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
These days Google, and to a lesser extent, MSN, Yahoo and Ask, pretty much rule the search engine universe. And because their spiders -- or web crawlers -- determine where your company will fall in their rankings, to a very large they degree they dictate how many of your customers are going to find your site.
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Whether you like it or not, you need to please these frequently moody monarchs or find yourself buried on a search engine results page (SERP), otherwise known as the black hole of marketing.
That's not where you want to be, so keep reading to find out how what you can do to improve your site's ranking.
PR For the Search Engine World
Search engine optimization or SEO is the key to your online marketing success and is neither as scary nor as difficult as it sounds. It is, according to Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.com, "the act of getting listed in search engines for free. It is PR for the search engine world. There are things that you can and should be doing to improve your listings with search engines, in the same way that there are things you can and should be doing that can improve the coverage you receive for free from television, radio and TV."
It is also, said Rebecca Lieb, editor in chief of the Click Z Network, which covers the Internet marketing industry and runs Search Engine Watch, "the first thing every small business owner should think about. [Small and midsize business owners] can get with the program through search engines [more] than through any other channel. A well-designed, well-optimized Web site can be found by search engines in the same way as the big guys."
There is a certain leveling of the playing fields when dealing with anything on the Internet. Search engine rankings are theoretically no different. But as Lieb notes, and as nearly all search engine experts agree, Web sites need to be designed and optimized in order to achieve those high rankings on the search engine listings, entailing either a certain level of knowledge on the part of smaller businesses, or the need to call in an expert, or some sort of combination of the two.
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