Search Engine Optimization, commonly referred to as SEO, is a crucial process required to build traffic to your web site. The most common use of the internet today is to search for information. Since the most common way that people will find your web site is by doing a search on a search engine, it's absolutely essential that your web site is designed and developed to perform at its best on the search engines.

You can have the most attractive web site on the internet with every feature designed to service all of the conceivable needs of your potential customers. However, if your web site is not optimized properly, it is most likely that people will not find your web site in the search engines and few visitors will arrive to your web site. To get traffic, you'll have to pay for expensive advertising.

There are so many gimmicks out there that can cost you a lot of money and waste your valuable time without producing any tangible results. Don't let anyone fool you. It's not as simple as a click of a button and success is not instant.

What is important to know about search engine optimization is that it is a process implemented in response to the requirements of the various algorithms used by the search engines. Yes, there are formulas with important variables and rules to follow. You wouldn't believe how easy it is to get your site banned from Google. There is no magic one shot solution. One size does not fit all.

An in-depth understanding of how it all works combined with experience will produce maximum performance results. At The Digital MultiMedia Store, based in Vancouver, we have developed our own methodical search engine optimization process that is guaranteed to provide you with excellent results. Based on our experience, we know how to get your web pages ranked #1 on Google, Yahoo and all of the major search engines around the world and keep you there. Furthermore, we give you the ability to track performance in real time 24/7 so you can easily monitor the progress of your site as it continues to achieve increasing numbers of top rankings.

Digital MultiMedia's Search Engine Optimization Process

Our search engine optimization process typically includes the following activities:

selecting the best keywords for your web pages
evaluating keywords performance potential on Google
assessing the competition
using the best keywords appropriately on your web pages
coding web pages correctly
building inbound links to web pages
proper submission of your site to appropriate search engines and  directories
reporting and transparency

Selecting The Best Keywords

Keywords are best described as those words that people type in to a search box on a search engine when they search for information. You want to find the best possible keywords to use on your web pages because using the right keywords will bring traffic to your web pages. The goal is to get the best possible targeted traffic to your site - the audience you are targeting - the ones that are mostly to buy your products and services.

So how do you select the best keywords for your web pages? This selection process is based on conducting the appropriate research and analysis.

First, we identify which keywords are the most frequently used by people to search for products and services that best describe what your web site and individual web pages are about. At The Digital MultiMedia Store, we access and research the world's largest database of information about keywords used by people in performing searches. This database contains data literally about billions of searches across the most popular search engines including Google and Yahoo. From this database we determine which keywords are the most popular.

Imagine the time and money wasted on optimizing web pages based on keywords that are not popular or seldom used by people to find your products and services.

Evaluating Performance Potential Of Keywords on Google

Once the most popular potential keywords for your web pages have been identified, we conduct research on Google to evaluate the performance potential of those keywords. For some keywords, competition is a lot stiffer than for other keywords. Generally speaking, for a one word keyword there is usually more competition than there is for a two word keyword phrase or three word keyword phrase.

We examine the Keyword Effectiveness Index, or KEI of potential keywords. A keyword phrase with a high KEI value indicates the keyword phrase is popular and there are fewer competing web pages for the keyword phrase. We evaluate the potential of these keywords.

Google is the most popular search engine and it is the most difficult search engine in which to achieve top rankings. However, once top rankings are achieved on Google, you can be assured that your web pages will achieve top rankings in most other search engines as well.

At Digital MultiMedia, we continuously research developments at Google that impact search engine rankings and bring new opportunities to our clients. If you'd like to learn more about how Google determines rankings of web pages, please read our section on Google PageRank.

Assessing Your Competition

Climbing to the top of the heap and getting top rankings on the search engines involves taking a look at your competition. Specifically, we look at what keywords they use, the content of their site, the number of inbound links and which web pages their links come from. This assessment defines what action has to be taken to overcome your competition.

Using Keywords Appropriately On Web Pages

The most important component of a web page is the actual copy or text content. It's important to craft the message to the target audience in an appealing way that reaches out to them and provides a solution to what they are looking for.

At the same time, it is important to place keywords in text content, image content and link content throughout the web page. Actual positioning, placement, frequency and context is important and can make the difference between a page ranking well or not.

Balancing the art of writing good copy while optimizing keywords for a web page comes with experience. Consider taking advantage of our web content authoring skills.

Coding Web Pages Correctly

Regardless of the programming language used to create your web site, there is certain coding that has to be added to every web page, in addition to page content, that controls whether or not a search engine will visit the page, crawl its content and include in its database. Coding is required to control how the content of the web page will be displayed in search results as well as provide information that is required for optimum ranking results. Without this coding, web pages are doomed regardless of how perfect the content coding or whether or not they have been submitted to the search engines.

A lot of web designers are perfectly capable of producing good looking web pages but they are not familiar with all of the search engine coding requirements and background coding required for a web page to rank well in the search engines. Furthermore, Google has different coding requirements than Yahoo and it's important to engage expertise on each of the major search engines to make sure all web pages can rank well in all of the search engines around the globe.

Certain coding languages or parts of coding are not recognized by the search engines and the related content will not be indexed and placed into the search engine databases. Other coding practices that seem fairly straightforward and commonly used will result in web sites getting banned. We can not emphasize enough the importance of proper coding for your web pages.

One of our coding practices that we would like to point out to you is the inclusion of code on your web server that will have the search engines crawling back for more - automatically. Yes, that's right. Every time a change is made to the content of a web page on your site, within a relatively short period of time, say 24 to 36 hours, Google will automatically visit your web site and update its database with the updated information. The rest of the search engines come knocking too.  For all those SEO companies on the net today that promise to submit your site every month, you ought to know that there really is no need for that service.

Building Inbound Links

A lot of literature on search engine optimization talks about how it's all just about building more links to your web site. Based on our experience and expertise, we can tell you that this is not the case.

Of course building inbound links to web pages is important for ranking well in the search engines.  It is regarded as an indication of popularity from the perspectives of the search engines.  However, of greater importance is the PageRank of the inbound link and its relevancy to your web site.

Links coming in from link farms can get you banned on Google. Whereas a much smaller number of inbound links from sites with a high Google PageRank, that are also sites with content that is related to yours, will get you a lot further up the ranking ladder.

In fact Google gives greater weight to links that are free as opposed to links that are bought and paid for simply for the purpose of increasing the volume of inbound links to a site. For a more detailed discussion of links and Google PageRank, please read our section on Google PageRank.

As our client, we will provide you with a link to free software that you can use to monitor the number of inbound links to your web site listed on the world's top 6 search engines. You can check your links in real time 24/7.

Proper Submissions To Search Engines And Web Directories

Once the right keywords for your web pages have been selected, included in page content, the page has been coded properly for search engine performance and a few inbound links have been built, it's time to submit your web site to the top search engines and web directories on the internet.

Because we view this step of the search engine optimization process to be so vital to the success of your web site, we submit your web site for FREE to the top 40 search engines and web directories on the internet. Not only are these submissions free, we do the submissions manually. That means NO AUTOMATED web site submissions that can often result in submission rejections. All submissions made are to sites with high Google PageRank that do not charge you money for getting listed on their sites.

Reporting And Transparency

As part of our effort to make you feel completely at ease with our services and to win over your trust and confidence, we provide complete free reporting, performance tracking and transparency in the entire search engine optimization process. No surprises. Get all of the information you could ever want in tracking your web site performance.

For a details on reports that are available to you, please read our section on Search Engine Reports.

Consider optimizing the web pages on your web site to drive targeted traffic to your site. Give us a chance to help you beat out your competitors and help you drive up revenues. We use leading technologies, experience and expertise in providing full and complete search engine optimization products and services for our clients.

If you have any questions about our Search Engine Optimization products and services, please feel free to contact us either by filling out the Information Request Form, or if you wish, send us an e-mail.