Search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing (SEM)

Plainly put, SEO is the art and science of attracting the right kind of people, for the right reasons, to your Web site.

The cocktail party effect

Imagine standing in the middle of a very crowded party, talking to no one in particular, and mumbling about what you do for a living. In this particular party, everyone has excellent hearing and their ears perk up when they hear you (or anyone else in the party) mumble about something in which they’re very interested. In fact, they come right over to see if you’re for real.

Our job, as SEO site designers, is to make sure we do the following:

• Learn who you want to attract — or avoid — at the party.
• Discover what words or phrases the partygoers are most likely to notice or discuss among themselves.
• Take note of the words or phrases that are so overused at the party that most people have learned to ignore them.
• Make sure you have the best party patter. (Remember, it’s more about what the other partygoers want to hear, initially, than what you want to say. Once they come over to listen more closely, you can shift gears.)

Put me on top: Pagerank, Adwords, CPC

You, like everyone else, would like to be listed on the first page of Google (or Yahoo or Bing). Preferably at the top, correct?

We can’t promise that, and you should avoid doing business with anyone who claims they can.

But we can use our knowledge and experience to move you higher in search engine results. With careful attention to the text in your Web site, where it’s positioned, how it’s linked, and how it’s styled, we can optimize your chances of appearing in response to the kinds of keywords your target audience is likely to use.

That’s the organic side of SEO — making sure the content on your site corresponds nicely to the concepts, products, or services for which people search.

Then there’s the “paid placement,” or CPC (cost-per-click), side of SEO. The best example is Google AdWords, those tiny ads that appear in the right column and sometimes at the very top left of the page. We can also promote your site and your offerings there, usually in a very cost-efficient way.

As Oscar Wilde said…

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” That’s one of our guiding philosophies in site design. We want people people to hear you, see you, talk about you. To not ignore you.

And when it comes to search marketing, we may urge you to take an aggressive stance, to better compete for attention among those companies or organizations that are already staking their territories. Google and other search engines have become crowded marketplaces that you can’t afford to ignore.

If Oscar Wilde was among us today, he might say “There is only one thing worse than being listed among your competitors — and that is not being listed among your competitors."