Your company has a website; it is looking great but was it constructed correctly? Are people finding your products on the internet? A lot of web design agencies do not construct websites correctly and use outdated methods.

Does your company website feature organically on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and/or Bing? In other words do people find your company’s website when they search for something relevant to your company’s products or services on a search engine? If the answer is no, then your company really need to consider optimizing the website to perform better organically.

Most website traffic originates from search engines. Most of these users find what they are looking for within the first page or first few pages of search results. What this means is you should strive to get your company’s website up into the first 30 listings for relevant search phrases. Internet users often trust organic listings more than paid for results (PPC) as they find these more relevant to what they are looking for.

So how should you convince your boss to buy SEO?
I would focus on the benefits below when drafting up a proposal.

• SEO will increase traffic to your company’s website
  More people will find your website thus the traffic to the website will increase.
• It’s not as expensive as PPC advertising in the long run
  Requires the least amount of capital for the maximum exposure of your website
• Increased visibility
  If a website is optimized it will increase the visibility on search results
• Measure results
  Traffic from search engines in your statistical program
• Long term positioning
  Listings in result pages are more permanent and not only bound to budget

4 Common mistakes on websites which affect your website’s organic position

Images that are links
A lot of designers create links with images for their navigation. These should be text as robots do not have the ability to understand images and cannot calculate the link’s relevance to its destination

Incorrect use of JavaScript
By using JavaScript to display content via mouse events on a web page you make it virtually impossible for robots to index your information as robots cannot perform mouse events on your website.

No use of title tags
The title tag is one of the most important on page factors for search engine optimization. The title describes the element it’s placed on which means that search engines can make more sense of it.

No use of headings
Search Bots use heading tags to make sense of a chunk of data/content. When using heading tags it is easier for robots to categorize a page.

Search Engine Optimization is a long term project as the affect might not be seen immediately but are worth the wait. For immediate results you should consider PPC but running both ads and doing SEO will yield the best results. In our next blog entry Noleen will go in to detail on Pay per Click Advertising and what sets it apart from Search Engine Optimization.