Industry News & Trends

We're seeing three types of businesses when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO).

• Profitable companies (usually large) with a strong brand and marketing initiatives that promote the website domain and address; still fail to rank for strategic search terms.
• Small, mid-size and large businesses with established domains that rank well on major search engines with very little effort (i.e. no formal SEO program).
• Small or mid-size companies that search engines just don't seem to notice.

If you look at those scenarios, you can see that brand recognition and marketing go a long way (including their influence on a company's profitability). The lack of rankings may be disappointing, but marketers sometimes have a tough time explaining a poor performance among natural search engine results.

With the second example, it's clear that any business at any time can stumble into solid rankings and traffic. It's not that they can't do better, but they can succeed without a master online marketing plan.

Finally, many companies are frustrated because they can't seem to figure out how to rank high for their favorite keywords and phrases. Here are 10 considerations that could be limiting your search engine visibility:

• If you have a new domain, you may not be able to target the most competitive keywords.
• Does your website lack content? It's a major reason why websites can't achieve high rankings (including keywords in the text is critical).
• Do you know how to effectively include keywords in your title tag?
• How sound is your web analytics? Are you keeping and evaluating detailed records of your visitor log files?
• Does the website have a lot of Flash animation that makes it tough for search engines to index?
• Is the website dominated by graphics in other areas, including the navigation?
• If it's a database website, what provisions have been made to tone down the long URLs?
• What percentage of the website is indexed by search engines? Is it a low percentage? Try site:www.yourdomainname.com on Google.
• Have you taken advantage of Google and Yahoo! special site map feeds to get more of their attention?
• Is your source code consistent and clean?

Questions? Call us at 866-RANK-YOU (726-5968) , or email us at info@fathomseo.com.