subject: Your Business Needs Seo [print this page] You managed to get hold of a good web designer, go through several rounds of design modifications and put your website on the internet for it to channel business to you.
Every day you keep a close watch on the email id associated with your website. Sometimes you even log-in to your web hosting administration page and see how many visitors you received. But somehow you feel as if nothing is happening. Not enough visits, no inquiries. You feel something is wrong. That there is some kind of a conspiracy against you and no visitors are coming to your website.
The above is a common occurance with many businesses launching their website for the first time. It is only when they meet and discuss with others, in person or on forums and blogs, do they realize what went wrong. This occurance is common with many customers that approach us for SEO Consultation. In their excitement and hurry to launch a website, one of the main elements of having a successful and popular to traffic website gets overlooked. The element referred to as Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
Having a website that is not friendly and optimized for search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo is one of the major reasons of websites not getting traffic through search engines. Just imagine buying a property, developing it as a hotel and waiting for guests to sign in ... without ensuring proper roads / connectivity and with nil advertisement. The only person who will get to it is you yourself.
If the idea of building a website is revolved around gaining business from it, you have to ensure that the major source of traffic to websites, the Search Engines know about it and are able to handle the data it presents.
Let me try and explain without getting into too much technicality. Before being listed in search results on search engines, your website has to be indexed by these search engines. For indexing the search engines need to be able to read your data, get an idea of what your product / service is about and then place you in proper categories.
In order to read your data search engines send out scouts, popularly known as robots or bots. These automated scouts need to be able to read the data on your website and this has to be in text format as they can not handle images and flash / movie files. Links for navigation between the different pages on your site are also opened and visited, provided they are in a text format with proper formatting.
Of course there are several more important, in fact very important factors to gain traffic from search engines. The terms that you need to study and investigate for this purpose are SEO or Search Engine Optimization.
SEO is expanded as Search Engine Optimization and can be explained as a speciality which deals with making sure your website can be handled properly by search engines and making it popular for more traffic leading to more business.
Since I am writing this article with the intention of introducing first time website owners to to the concept of SEO, I am not getitng into technnical issues and believe me, there is a lot of technical stuff that matters for SEO.
I guess whats important is to know that having a business website up and running is not enough. Your website needs SEO!
