Long before you think about ANY online advertising, you need to be sure your Web site is search engine ready. Getting search engine ready is simple yet, if absent from your Web strategy, it can actually work against your goals.

Getting search engine ready is all about homework. This means gaining an understanding of how search engines work, then ensuring everything on your pages are search engine-friendly. This is called search engine optimization ("SEO") which is an important First Step toward the larger umbrella of search engine marketing ("SEM"). The goal is to tap the power of a good natural (unpaid, "organic") search engine ranking first. Ninety percent of good search engine marketing rests in your site ... rests in your hands and requires no budget. We'll explain.

You manage your Web site -- you select and name the images, you select and name any PDFs, and your select and write your content based on your expertise. This is what search engines are looking for when they inventory ("index") your site. Search engines are looking for keywords and certain "tags" and how they are used on EVERY PAGE of your site. They even drill down to things like your file structure and ALT text attached to images.

Getting Search Engine Friendly
As a start, the three critical tags you should pay strategic attention to on each page are:

<META NAME="description" content="xxx xxxx xxx xx.">
<META NAME="keywords" content="xxx,xxx,xxx">
<title>xxx xx xxxx xxx.</title>

All tags live in the "header" of all Web pages on all Web sites everywhere. They are inserted by almost every HTML software and almost as routinely ignored. (If you want to see my tags for this page, as an example, click VIEW and SOURCE.) Not addressing your tags is like never releasing the street address of your business -- it is widely insane.

Using the example tags above and following the bolded xxx, you will see that all you need to do is fill in the blanks. Pretty simple. You don't even need to know HTML.

Of course all this leads to other supporting questions:

-- Should tags on the home page be different from other pages?
-- How important is image optimization (or the FIVE other types of optimization)?
-- Do search engines display tag information?
-- Do tags have word limits and other strategies?
-- Are there utilities that can help identify other problems on our Web site?
-- Are there other things we can do to help our search engine ranking?

We can help your planning -- email us with any search engine questions