Wikipedia - Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) target paid listings. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

Firestorm always recommends proceeding with a Google campaign for the first 3 – 6 months of having your site go live to give it a bit of a kick start to be found on the search engine listings.  This can be done through us to complete your website build strategy and have everything done in one place.

In general, it is standard for it to take several weeks to get your site properly registered on the search engines, so please do not panic if within the first 3 weeks you have not seen any improvement in your natural search listings when using a search engine to find your website.  It can take up to 6 weeks for your site to be properly indexed within the main search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Within the Firestorm CMS you have 4 key fields which are used by the “spider” or “Google” – “bots”.  These are: Page Title, Alias, Meta Data and Meta Keywords.  The “bots” will “crawl” across the text in these areas, collecting the text information and returning them when someone searches for a word or term which is in your website.

When putting text into the Meta Data and Meta Keywords think about what information is going into the document and words which relate directly to the content.  The best practice is for the Meta Data to be compared to a summary or introduction to the page, and the Meta keywords are key words which are used in the text.

Images on the website are also key to searches, and putting a title in for the image is not only important of usability for people who use aids with their computers, such as text readers, but also the title of the image will also come up within a search so using this title in a clever way can also improve your natural listings greatly.

When working with you on your Google pay-per-click campaign we will discuss and go through the best practice for your main pages to get the best out of the page title, alias, meta data and keywords, making sure that we have the same text and style of information running for your campaign text so that they both work together.

Another avenue to explore for getting a high natural listing is to having reciprocal links with companies who you have an affiliation or accreditation from.  Having a link from their site to yours and vice versa will help to gaining you higher rankings as these links are taking into consideration when returning the search results by the “bots”.

A sitemap is also a crucial element to search engines, and this is a hidden page which will hold the structure of your site.  There will also be one which can be viewed in a more “friendly” way for your viewers to use if they need assistance in viewing the websites structure.  This is a vital practice for large sites, but is a well known item to have on a website so has become a standard item on websites today.  The sitemap will be automatically generated when you create new pages etc so you do not need to worry about this item on a daily basis.

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