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The best time to request search engine optimization is before you design your web site. As your web site designer creates page templates for you to approve, you can have a search engine optimization specialist take a look at them and tell you which layout is best for optimum indexing. Once you have selected the best layout for your web site, then the search engine optimization specialist can tell your designer when and where to place your keywords and key phrases within your HTML tags.

How can you tell a quality search engine optimization specialist from a scam artist? A search engine optimization specialist should be able to get your site indexed well for Google, Inktomi, and Yahoo. The 2 search engines and 1 directory differ in the way they index sites. Google does not use meta-tag content for relevancy. Inktomi currently uses meta-tags. And Yahoo is a directory. Ask how your site will be designed and tagged for each of these. If you don’t get 3 different answers, then you should move on to a more experienced search engine optimization professional.

If your web site has already been designed, a professional search engine optimization specialist will often recommend layout and design changes. He/She is not telling you that you have a bad-looking web site. He/She is telling you that the site’s layout will not get indexed well for your targeted keywords and key phrases. For example, a site that has a triple frameset (on the top and on the side) is extremely difficult to get indexed well on search engines, even with a gateway page. However, a simple frameset can get indexed well in search engines, with or without a gateway page. A search engine optimization specialist can design or tell your web site designer how to lay out a simple frameset to get the best results.

Search engine optimization and other marketing strategies (banner advertising, web copywriting, being listed in Yahoo, posting to discussion groups, etc.) are not substitutes for a web site with solid content and great layout. Search engine optimization is not a substitute for customer service, a good sales pitch, or a great product/service. It is not a substitute for a well-planned online and offline marketing plan. Search engine optimization is a means of helping your potential customers find your web site. It is a highly specialized marketing tool.

Smaller one or two page websites, also known as sales pages, are the easiest and quickest to get indexed in the three major search engines almost anyone can generally succeed by just manually submitting through each search engines submission process. Websites with a considerable number of pages will often only immediately get their first page indexed which therefore requires small effective planning strategies and a little bit of patience to become completely indexed.

Effective Key Planning Strategies:

(1) Prior to submitting your websites to the search engines or establishing link partners which will cause the search engines to start indexing in your website. Start planning out the basic website structure so that search engines robots can easily flow through your website and index each page.

(a) Have an sitemap linked from you main index page that thinks through out your website.

(b) If possible, ensure that each page is linked together, not just back to the main index page. This is not possible depending on what type of website you have, the number of pages, or your website design and structure. But this has been a successful technique in the past.

(c) Build and submit a Google Sitemap.

(2) Test your websites design and structure using Google Sitemap Software such as SOFTplus GSiteCrawler (Freeware) that will try and index your entire website. If your unsuccessful building a index of your entire website, then further planning and design changes maybe in order to index your entire website. If the software can not index your entire website, how will the search engine robots index your entire website?

(3) Instead of manually submitting your websites, submit your website through directories and establish link partnerships. This will improve how often your website is crawled by the search engines and how fast your website is indexed. Also, when establishing link partnership and directories higher the Google Page Rank, the quicker your website will be indexed and how often your website is crawled.

(4) Lastly, Patience. The process the search engine will go through while indexing your website is: First, the search engine will have to find your website (Hence, establishing partnerships with high Google Page Rank), then crawling through your website and absorbing all the information contained, then ranking each individual page and finally your website will appear in the search engine result pages (SERPs).