If you are a serious business website owner, chances are you are constantly on the lookout for ethical means to promote your website to your target market. Chances are also good that you probably read somewhere or heard from someone that your most practical promotion solution is to trust your business to a search engine optimization company. The processes of promoting your site and increase your online visibility is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. If you are familiar with the term but do not have the expertise to properly implement SEO for your website, then you might want to consider hiring a Search Engine Optimization Company to do that work for you.

What is a Search Engine Optimization company? It is an organization whose objective is to provide the necessary tools and expertise to optimize your website towards the goal of securing for you a first or second page ranking in the search engine’s list of keyword-responsive sites. A Search Engine Optimization company’s role is that of an influencer, i.e., the strategies it employs for your website are geared towards influencing the search engine’s “spiderbot” to give it a high relevance rating which, in turn, influences its ranking. A Search Engine Optimization company’s indirect role is also to influence the surfer to visit your website but is not responsible for what happens to the visit.

There are many Search Engine Optimization companies that have hung their virtual shingle in cyberspace, with many more sprouting up each and every day. With so many choices available, it is important that you are guided in selecting the right Search Engine Optimization company that best suits your requirements and budget. Here are a few tips in selecting that Search Engine Optimization company:

• Always Go for Reputation and Experience

This is pretty much a common sense tip. When you are headed for the unknown, it always makes sense to go with a guide who knows what you don’t. A Search Engine Optimization company that has years of experience as an organization and has people working for it with years of individual experience is normally a good choice. Experience, however, is just one half of this selection criterion, the other half being REPUTATION. A Search Engine Optimization company may have the experience, but if it has a track record of unethical or even illegal SEO activity, then the experience counts for nothing.

• Avoid SEO companies that Spam

A Search Engine Optimization company that sends spam email to promote itself is not a good Search Engine Optimization company and will get your site banned costing you more that it will ever benefit from.

• A company that hides everything, has something to hide

Beware of the Search Engine Optimization company that has a “black box” solution for everything that ails your website, i.e., you don’t need to know how it works; you just pay. In all likelihood, what this type of Search Engine Optimization company is hiding from you is, at best, unethical, or at worst, illegal. It is very important for you to understand what is going to be done with your website (in lay man’s terms) because, at the end of the day, it IS your website and you will have to live with whatever the Search Engine Optimization company does to it.

• Go Window Shopping

Like with every important purchase decision you make, you must check out more than one Search Engine Optimization company before you make a decision. Ask for a list of the websites they claim to have worked on, and do your own research. Also, ask each Search Engine Optimization company you are considering about what they think of the other candidates in your list. Be wary if they launch into a negative marketing pitch about their competition. A really good Search Engine Optimization company will rarely badmouth a competitor. Even if the competitor is really bad, the worst that a good Search Engine Optimization company will do is objectively point out their strengths and weaknesses.

• Go with the Clear Deal

A good Search Engine Optimization company will always be very clear any work proposal it makes. It clearly spells out the terms of reference, timelines, commercial aspects, guarantees, penalties, any other items that it and you may find relevant towards meeting your expectations. That way, you know what you are getting into and what (and what not) to expect.

These are but a few tips on how to select the expert that will take care of optimizing your website for you. Approach a Search Engine Optimization company like you would any other company that you are considering to handle some work for you, and you are covered.

Well, this is not enough to have an attractive website to show company products/services on internet to get business nationally or internationally. If company products or services are not advertised then definitely there will be no awareness of its existence in the market. Same is the case with online websites. There are many ways to advertise a website for its awareness in the market. One of the most common ways, which is increasing rapidly, is the Search Engine Optimization as a part of Search Engine Marketing. When we need to get information of foreign universities, national or international job opportunities, worldwide news, latest technology products, customers from all over the world and many more; we turn towards Search Engines like Google.com or Yahoo.com etc. Search Engine is a tool for searching information on the internet by giving topic as keyword(s) which returns the relevant websites.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the amount and quality of traffic to a website by making its contents Search Engine friendly. In Search Engine Optimization a website is prepared and altered to make it as compatible as possible with Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN and it also focuses the contents to the keywords and key phrases desired by the customers. It is preferred to get optimization of a website during its construction because structure of the website is to be designed according to the rules and regulations of search engines but it can also be optimized after publishing a website on internet. Many website designing and development companies in Pakistan are offering Search Engine Optimization service during construction of website and even after designing and publishing of a website. These companies can be easily found through Search Engines by putting any keyword like “Search Engine Optimization in Pakistan” or “SEO experts in Pakistan”.

Many small and large entrepreneurs are focusing on online services like online shopping, fashion boutiques, hotels & accommodation, event management, real estate, travel agencies, outsourcing and different unique services. Entrepreneurs get developed their company website but forget to invest on its Search Engine Optimization. They either don’t know about it or they are unaware of its importance. From now on, job of SEO experts starts to follow rules and regulations of famous Search Engines to make available optimized website against keywords by the visitors in a search engine. Although there may be thousands of competitors of a particular website with its products or services but only those websites will be seen in Search Engines’ top results which will be properly optimized. Many Search Engines maintain database of new & old websites automatically and many store information manually but it depends on the algorithm of the Search Engine that how do they operate.

Search Engines work by following this specific order i.e. Web crawling, Indexing and Searching. Web crawling is the process in which a crawler (also known as Spider- a program that browses websites automatically) visits all available links of a website to store information of its webpages. Search Engines’ crawlers continuously crawl websites after specific time to get its up-to-date information to make it available on the keywords by the search engine users. Normally Google takes 20 days and Yahoo takes 30 days to revisit a website for its latest information. Indexing collects and stores data of websites for its fast and accurate information retrieval. Search Engines usually extract information of the website from its title, description, heading, special fields (meta-data) and file names. When a keyword or keyphrase is entered in a search engine to search information then the keyword is checked against the search engine’s index of all the web pages it has analyzed. The best URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) are then returned as hits and ranked in order with the best results at the top as process of Searching.

While optimizing a website, two important aspects of Search Engines should never be forgotten: Robots.txt and Sitemap. Robot.txt is being used to prevent access of web spiders to different parts of the website for its publicity. So spiders will leave those webpages which will be mentioned in the Robots.txt at the root directory of uploaded website on the internet. Sitemap is used to inform Search Engines about available webpages on a website for its crawling. Sitemap also facilitates to mention webpage’s importance and date of last modification so that Search Engines can crawl it easily to get latest information available on the website.

Many of SEO Experts play tricks with Search Engine to come into top ranking which is known as Black-hat or Spamdexing but famous Search Engines do not follow one algorithm to rank websites. People should avoid such tricks because if a website is found doing such activities then it is very difficult to get good ranking in famous Search Engines and more importantly a website can loose the trust of visitors if they are not able to find their required information on the website.

Search Engine Optimization plays a vital role to increase traffic of relevant visits to the company website that in turn, increases the visits of potential customers as well. This helps to attain major objective of the website i.e., online business. If you are planning to build a new website, you must optimize your website according to SEO rules and regulations during its construction. If your company already has a website then it must be optimized to get good ranking in Search Engines and more customers from all over the world.

[Article by M. Munir Bhatti]