search engine optimization
SEO is the science of increasing traffic to a web site through improvement of internal and external factors which influences how search engines rank that site in their listings. It's worth remembering that search engine ranking changes week by week and never rests, like business competition.
The need to have an understanding of what SEO is all about is important, particularly for small businesses who want to bring themselves to the attention of potential customers. A properly constructed and validated site is an important foundation and goes a long way in assisting with SEO. Straightforward navigation and relevant information on pages is the next step.
If you already have a web site it's unlikely to be enough to have just added meta tags and submitted the site to various search engines, which is the usual route carried out by web design companies. If you want to maximise the chances of your site being up there on page 1 of a search engine enquiry you're going to need to have a content-rich site which doesn't rely on lots of moving images. To explain simply, search engines can't usually access content delivered by moving images because they read the HTML code that exists behind the page you see on the screen. Moving images are not displayed using HTML code.
paid and organic SEO
Search engine optimiization methods fall basically into two camps, paid and organic SEO. If you are a business with a large promotion budget then paying for search engine listings or throwing a sizeable chunk of money at Google Ads may be the way forward. However, for many small businesses these options may not be considered cost-effective and a small budget can be better spent on outsmarting your competition using skills which combine coding, specialist writing for the web and a bit of puzzle solving, which is what SEO is all about. This option returns better long term value because the more you put into the site, in SEO terms, the more you are likely to achieve in terms of consistent search engine visibility.
Twitter away?
Recently there has been much written about the value of of social networking sites for increasing business web site traffic. These sites can be valuable but they are not a short cut to success in the war of search engine ranking and will be time consuming to maintain.
Patience is the key to SEO success, there is no fairy dust that will work wonders. Beware of companies who offer a quick fix, it's very unlikely to happen. Good web site structure and content rich pages cannot be stressed enough as important and valuable assets in the armoury needed for successful search engine ranking.