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In a highly competitive market, it is crucial for every business to have a presence on the web and the design of the website is vital to its success. The internet is often the first place that potential customers look when searching for a company to meet their requirements. A nicely designed, clearly presented and information rich website will result in the correct first impression.

Often businesses assume that the cost of high quality website design will be unaffordable. While increasing numbers of business owners are gaining a better understanding of a good website and its benefits, for many it just seems too expensive and complicated an option. However, it is feasible to design and develop a quality bespoke website from as little as a few hundred pounds. This can pay for itself time and time again in the increased sales revenue that it can generate for the business.

As well as website design, a professional company will also be in a position to offer SEO or search engine optimisation services. It is a fact that potential customers will not usually look beyond the first page of search results, so it is important to ensure that the website promoting your business will be included on the first page of the search results for your target key phrases.

You should aim for well designed and coded web pages and use keywords in the text that you think your customers would search for. Generally speaking, content rich sites have been shown to perform better in search engine results, and it is important to achieve the right balance between search engine results and designing website pages that are easy to read and navigate. However, the single most important factor in determining your rankings in the search engines will be the number and quality of incoming links pointing to your website.

For a website to be an effective marketing and selling tool, both the website design and how it is marketed are important things to consider. Making sure that the site is optimised for SEO and getting quality one way links from relevant sites are all factors that will help to ensure the success of your website and business. A professional website development company has the design skills and online marketing expertise to produce a site that will be a successful selling tool for years to come.

Internet marketing is carrying out certain activities that create sales and/or capture leads from potential customers that are surfing the net .

This means getting your website to rank in Google, Yahoo MSN, article directories, blog directories, RSS Feeds, Social Networks, and other search related sites so that appears when a potential customer of yours types in a “keyword phrase” that relates to your website.

This is something of a mysterious art  these days and is a constantly changing playing field . As each year passes there is a greater need to bring in specialists and consultants that work purely in this arena, in order for website owners to be able to get their sites at the top of Google’s search engine results for the keywords that everyone thinks will generate sales and leads. This service is called SEO or search engine optimization. The other way  for  businesses to achieve the same goal is to arrange for their staff  to participate in focused training seminars, or one on one training, to gain the necessary skills to do this work in-house

Internet marketing has grown to include pay per click advertising. Ads that are postioned within the results pages of search engines (when you do a Google search , they show up on the right hand side of the page) that are written by advertisers to be triggered when certain keywords or phrases are searched. Each time a person clicks on the ad, they are sent to the advertiser’s website, and the advertiser is charged for that “click”. This is how Google makes billions of dollars .

The next big thing in Internet marketing is the social networking sites like Facebook. Here, the best form of advertising  will be “viral” and more “virtual word of mouth”. This is much more difficult to manage than search engine optimization and pay per click advertising, but has the potential to be much more lucrative!

There are many companies that specialise in assisting company’s in their Internet Marketing efforts.

Home Based Business Opportunities

When you’re ready to promote your site, there are a number of things you can do. If you’re in Western Washington, and are looking for a Seattle SEO company, call GSEP.COM at 1-800-851-7666.

PPC, PTC, SEO, EIEIO (Ha!) and more. (FYI, those acronyms stand for, in order, Pay Per Click, Pay To Click, SEO and Old McDonald’s Farm). It can all be confusing.

The natural or organic rankings that are provided in the main sections of Google and most other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo & AOL are the most trusted. When one refers to organic, they mean the results that are not PPC or Pay Per Click.

When you look at the SERPs, or Search Engine Results Pages (the pages that show up when you’ve done a search - the pages that show the results of your search) they show both PPC results and organic results. So, it can be confusing.

Those that occupy the majority of the left hand portion of the SERPs are the organic ranking.

Google, for example, has Sponsored Links above the main body of organic results. Google also has Sponsored Links, vertically, over on the right side of the page. The other engines are similar. The “Organic Results”, which most say the real results, are on the left, below the PPC listings.

How can your site achievetop organic rankings?

1) On page optimization, also known as SEO. You need to make sure that your page has everything that the engine (in this case, Google) wants. It could be Yahoo, MSN, AOL, whatever. Read, study, hire a professional (such as the SEO Seattle company, GSEP.COM).

2) Blogs. You must get posts out here in the Blogosphere.

3) Links within in your site. You need links, with the most important keywords, pointing to your home page or to a particular page you’ve had specifically designed to rank highly for an important term.

4) Link partners. You should work to develop a program to increase the quantity of links linking in from outside your site.

Do each of these things, and more and you’re well on the way to top SEO rankings. If you’re looking for a top SEO Seattle company, take a look at Guaranteed Search Engine Positioning at GSEP.COM.

I was reading a thread at a big webmaster forum yesterday which made the claim that “SEO is dead.” Now, it’s hard to say whether or not the original poster was being serious or sarcastic, but he referenced some other news he’d been reading on a few authority sites that made the “dead” claim.

The notion was that, because of the prevalence of Web 2.0 community sites, the idea of needing to optimize for any of the engines was going away — and fast. The idea was also put forth by another poster that, because of the huge number of content management systems that are already setup to be “search engine friendly”, the need to have any additional knowledge to rank well was quickly diminishing.

My answer to all this? Poppycock.

First, while it is true that there are many CMS programs that are search engine friendly out of the box, on-page factors matter so little to ranking (at least in Google) that even if the on-page playing field was leveled, it would make little difference in the current search engine results.

Second, SEO is about far more than just what’s on the page. The way you analyze what keywords are worth optimizing for, the way you write the content around those keywords, and the links you get to the pages that you want to rank for those keywords all have a large role to play in how much traffic you get from the search engines — and that analysis takes specialized knowledge. Anyone can learn to do it, but it does have to be learned.

Third, and most importantly, Web 2.0 is nice, and sites that revolve around that kind of community are huge traffic mongers (e.g. YouTube), but there will always be a need for full-text indexing of the web.

So is SEO dead? Nope. It’s alive and well, and will be for as long as people need to search for information on the web.