Primary objective of any Web-Site is to disseminate information. People visit a web-site for its content - be it information, guidance, data, picture or status of bank account. However, success of this primary objective depends a great deal on its ability to attract right visitors in good numbers. For, however great is the content - its of little use if there is no taker for it.

Quality of content, undoubtedly a critical success factor for any web-site, is no guarantee on number of visitors a web-site gets daily. Someone has to actively promote the web-site among target audience to make its existence known. This is akin to advertisement and brand building in physical world.

There are many methods of promoting web-sites in the WWW like banner ads, e-mail campaign, link popularization, viral marketing etc, but search engine placement has been proved to be the most cost effective over time.

The reason why search engine has won over other avenues of web promotion is consistency. While traffic from banners or e-mail campaign may rise and fall over time - a high rank in search engine usually hold and provide targeted traffic indefinitely. Besides, it is comparatively less expensive and provide maximum number of quality visitors over a long duration.

If a web-site ranks high in at least a few top search engines and is able to hold on to this position through various optimization techniques - the web-site owner may reasonably be assured of sufficient number of quality customers throughout the year !

Just think how much you need to spend for bringing that many customers through trade fairs, overseas traveling etc. - and you know the value of search engines in your export business.

Search engines rank a web-site based on its relevance in the context of given search keywords. The relevance is measured by an automated process that takes into account various parameters of concerned web-site such as structure, title, meta tags, content, distribution of keywords, link popularity, etc.

Optimization means preparing a web-site in such a way that search engines reward it with high relevance for given keywords.

Crux of optimization process is to look at a web-site from the viewpoint of a search engine robot and make necessary changes in various parameters so that the robot finds the web-site highly relevant for given search keywords.

Unless you have consciously worked for it - your web-site is NOT optimized. Going by large number of web-sites that I come across everyday - my feeling is that most web-designers do not know what is optimization.

One must understand design and optimization are two separate processes. Your web-site may be well designed - but not necessarily OPTIMIZED.

Look of a web-site is not everything - it must be able to attract quality customers so that return on its investment remains positive. Design and optimization - both are essential for best result.

You need to evaluate web-site's performance in major search engines and develop a plan for improving it in a time bound way.

The assignment will include following broad tasks:

• Select right keywords



• Evaluate present rank of your web-site in top search engines for selected keywords



• Tinker with various parameters such as title, meta tags, link popularity, keyword density etc. for optimum search engine rank



• Submit your web-site to search engines



• Monitor performance regularly and take corrective actions wherever required

Needless to say, you need help from SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert and various software for automating the process of measuring, optimizing, submitting and monitoring your web-site performance.

We shall discuss each of these processes in detail