If the main underlying purpose of your website is to market your organization or expose a targeted customer to your products or services, then the need to rank well AND be found on at least the first page of the Internet’s top search engines and directories is extremely important.

With that being said, the question is posed: How? How does any company, small or large, achieve reasonable search engine rankings? Some of you may already have an idea, and some of the answers may surprise you…

The first thing you will have to commit to is hard work. Like so many other things in life, achieving high search engine rankings takes a great effort. There are no free rankings in search engine optimization. Your website will need to be updated with new content regularly, keywords and key phrases must be monitored frequently, link building is a must, and, and, and….

We often describe SEO as a constant game of cat and mouse. Search Engines and Directories such as Google, Yahoo and MSN are constantly adjusting and improving their algorithms and weighting criteria, which affect how sites are ranked day to day. We, the website administrators of the world, are constantly monitoring results, researching, and adjusting our efforts to keep up with these changes. That’s a full time job in itself…

For a continuation of my thoughts on SEO, please stay tuned in next Wednesday!