What's Search Engine Optimization...
And How Can it Help Your Website?
Overview of this week's e-Newsletter
Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing a web page or website in order to make it rank higher for a given search term/phrase in search engines. This week I wanted to explain a little more about what this process is and how it can help your website generate more visitors.

What's Search Engine Optimization Really All About?
The purpose of search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization (SEO for short) is really about getting you more visitors to your website. At a basic level it's marketing your website specifically to search engines. Why search engines? Most internet users surf the internet in 2 ways. One is to directly type in the website address of the site they wish to visit. The other way is to search in a search engine for a keyword or phrase of a topic they want to find a website for. The goal of SEO is to get your website showing up higher for keywords or phrases (you choose) on search engines, which in turn will generate people clicking through from the search engine to your website. In a way its like gathering a target audience and funneling them into your website. The result will get you more website visitors which leads to more customers or more people to hearing what your website is communicating.

How SEO Can Help You!
How search engine optimization can help your organization.
The benefits of SEO are actually easy to see. You get your website optimized to show high for specific keywords and in turn you get more traffic to your site. What can that mean? As I said before, with more visitors to your website you'll get more customers and/or more people hearing your website's message. You can think of it as a new way to market your business.

An Example Of SEO We Did!
Example of a website we optimized and where it ended up in the search engines.
Despite how it may appear SEO is hard lengthly work. There are several phases that must be completed to get a website ranking higher. These included competitive research, optimizing important factors on your website, getting relevant links from other websites pointing back to website, and making adjustments from monitoring the work you did. All-in-all the process takes some time although is mainly dependent on the time a search engine will take to re-catalog your website in their search results. Due to the search engine's re-cataloging time one should expect to see the full results of SEO work is around 4-6 months.

It's a long time but in the end the results you receive are worth the time. As an example, after several months of work on one of our own websites we have achieved the #1 position for the phrase we where optimizing for (in Google). In fact because of the work we put in and the continued maintenance we have maintained that position for over 2 years now!

Check out these results:

#1 position in Google for "chiropractic website design"
For the website www.chirointernet.com (one of our profession specific websites)

Final Words
Ending comments
Well I hope that helps you understand what search engine optimization is all about and realize why it might be something you may need.

And as always, look for next week's newsletter where we hope to provide you with more useful tips and advice. If you have any suggestions about topics you would like to hear more about please send us an email with your thoughts.