SEO

In today's computer-centric economy, search engine optimization is extremely important no matter what business you are in. In brief, SEO is the soliciting of web traffic using search engines. The most common form of this is trying to obtain a higher ranking on the major search engines (google, yahoo, bing).

While few understand how the google ranking algorithm works, resources such as http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization explain some of the things a web host/designer can do to raise your ranking on search engines. Some things include keyword placement, meta data and tags, and making sure your web design code and content is clean and efficient.

Here's an example of how SEO can be crucial for businesses. I had a teacher who wrote a fairly prominent blog on the internet. She had a poor experience at one of her local car dealerships (lets call it Bob's Cars), and decided to post about it on her blog. Since her blog was fairly popular (and had existed for over 10 years), whenever someone searched "Bob's Cars" in google, her blog (containing the negative opinion on the company) came up higher in the search ranking than the actually dealership's website. The dealership ended up giving my teacher a great deal on a car, as long as she took the post down.

Companies are also using social networking sites to promote their businesses. Even though this may seem unnecessary or 'tacky', I feel it can be very successful for promotion. The age old marketing slogan, "any publicity is good publicity" really comes into play here: Social Networking sites pull in record amounts of internet traffic. Companies that host advertisements on these sites are getting their name out, which is important for a business.