Your website has TWO target audiences: Your human visitors and your search engine Robots. Do you dare neglect either!
Better than 90% of all website traffic today comes from search engines. So, clearly, the very best way for most companies to bring people to their site is through the search engines. Unfortunately, many search engine queries will return hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of web pages. Your site could be on the 1st page of the resultant listing or it could be on the 705th page. And the bad news is ... most users will never get past the 2nd or 3rd page of results.
Search Engine Optimization means designing web pages with search engines in mind. It is the very heart of your strategic internet marketing campaign. A web site must be built every step of the way with optimization in mind. Every word and every graphic must be used properly or the campaign will fail. Over the last few years, the internet business seems to have been taken over by graphic artists. Visual appeal has become the all-important factor. The problem is that many of these graphic artists do not really understand how the internet works from a business standpoint. They look at the internet as another place to display their art, and miss the importance of designing for the search engine robots (bots or spiders) as well as the human visitor.
While we certainly recognize the importance of visual appeal, BEST keeps the focus on your business at every step. We will work with your company to make sure that your site will appeal to both of its target audiences; human and bot.
There are plenty of services which happily take your money every month and submit your site to thousands and thousands of search engines, directories, FFA sites, etc. They will provide voluminous reports to prove that their submissions were successful, and their efforts (and your money) will yield ... well ... nothing. The world of search engine marketing has changed over the years. As recently as a year or two ago, one of the keys was the number of links pointing to your site. That is no longer the case. Links are important, but only links that are relevant and contribute to your message will contribute to your search engine placement. Submissions are still an important step in your search engine marketing campaign, and we will certainly submit your site to the search directories and major engines, but it no longer makes sense to submit your site to thousands of search engines and directories. The playing field has changed.
Search engines learn about your website by running a program (the "bot", "robot" or "spider") that simply follows links across the internet and reports what it finds back to the search engine. These are automated programs. They follow programmed rules along their travels, and report what they are programmed to report. If your website is not optimized to provide these "bots" with what they are looking for, the search engines are not going to see enough to rank your site highly. Many "features" can block information from these "bots", and inefficient coding can starve them of what they need. Either way, your ranking, and your traffic suffer as a result of non-optimized code.
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