In the days of yesteryear when one wanted to get a product or service and did not know who to turn to they would open the Yellow Pages and start dialing the telephone until they found what they were looking for or spending the day driving from business to business. Those days have changed. Now we instinctively open Google and type in (or even just ask for) what we are looking for. A list of people who can potentially do what is needed is at your fingertips in seconds. So, the question is, is your business appearing where it could be in those results?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become as vital to a business as standard advertising used to be. It is also nothing new. It has been around since the early days of the Internet. Originally a search engine would examine a page and its content and weigh it using their own rankings to determine what would be displayed first. Each search engine used its own algorithm so what appeared as the first link in Alta Vista may not be the first result on Dogpile (remember them?).

Most algorithms were based on keyword count or meta tag data which could be easily manipulated but no one really knew how to come up with a better way. That changed in 2005 when Google introduced its search engine. Google used more than 200 different factors to determine its ranking and other search engines like Yahoo and Bing have followed suit.

Just like with older search engines a website is examined and indexed. The root file is the first examined but not every page is examined. The further down the directory tree the page is the less likely it is to be indexed. The algorithm attempts to minimize black hat SEO techniques like spamindexing and/or typing keywords onto the page and coloring the font the same as the background or positioning them offscreen. These can be discovered by either the algorithm or by human examination and the site is penalized. White hat SEO techniques are the best to employ. It rewards websites for creating content for their users rather than for the crawler.

Is this right for you? If you depend on organic search engine clicks then yes. Remember that of all search engine users 33% of them click on the first link only compared to 18% with the second or third link, so half of the potential clicks are not going past the second result. 91% never go to the second page of results and 99.9% never even make it to page three. That could potentially be a lot of customers being lost by not being in the right place in the search engine.

If you don’t know what to do there is help out there. Nicely Done Sites can help boost and/or maintain your search engine ranking to help keep business coming in. If your business is sitting on page two of the search results you have nothing to lose at this point except more business.

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