Nearly 80 percent of first-time website visitors find those websites through a search engine. In fact, search engines have surpassed television advertising as the top means of customer acquisition, according to the Direct Marketing Association.

Most companies and websites have failed to incorporate basic search engine programming, a.k.a. “search engine optimization,” into their marketing mix. With a couple of modifications, websites can realize their quest for a top 10 rank in key search engines like Google. Here are some keys to know:

• Search engines like text links. Therefore, switch all navigation/menu to a text-based system. Fancy graphics are nice, but search engines cannot interpret graphics or pictures of words on your site. While you’re at it, get rid of that Flash introduction. Search engines can’t read content using Macromedia’s Flash technology either.
• Make sure to use page titles correctly. Every page on a website should have a title indicating content and containing as many relevant keywords as possible.
• Think high school and become popular. Many of the search engines use what is called “link popularity” to help rank your website. Link popularity is the number of links from other websites to your website. Your ranking will rise if you can get all of your friends, associates, vendors, partners and clients to put a link to your site on their website. In turn, you should kindly reciprocate the favor.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2003 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Search Engine Optimization.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.