Ask yourself this; in the last 2 months, privately or professionally, to research a product or service that you are interested in buying, have you:

• answered a direct mail advertisement (3% of those asked answered yes)
• gone to mainstream media (magazine, radio, television etc) (22% of those asked answered yes)
• looked at print Yellow Pages? (3% of those asked answered yes)
• gone to Google or another search engine? (100% of those asked answered yes. YES 100%!)
• tapped your online social networks and received a website address that you have visited (80% od those asked answered yes)

Search Engines are clearly the primary means of getting found by potential customers.* And 85-90% of search engine visitors don't look past the first page of results. Isn’t it time you stopped reverting to the old traditional methods and seriously engage with a medium that delivers results?

*Social media is fast catching up. To read about social media click here

Optimisation Will Help You Generate More Business Online

Need more compelling reasons to conduct a Search Engine Optimization(SEO) project and to get your business ranking on the top of Google searches?

• 93% of users worldwide use search engines to find websites (Forrester Research).
• More than 92% of searchers never search for brand names (DoubleClick).
• 85-90% of Google users don’t look past the first page of results.
• 87% of people who are ready to buy use the normal (‘natural’ or ‘organic’) results, not the sponsored/paid listings.
• 73% of global chief executives (CEOs, CIO's, etc.), say that they prefer to find out about new products online.
• 100% of customers see the first, second and third results in an organic search. Whereas only 50% see the first result in the sponsored listings (PPC/paid ads). And only 40% see the second paid result, and 30% see the third.

So what are you waiting for??!
 

The following is a good introduction and overview of Search Engine Optimisations - You will need to register to access but these guys run good webinars http://www.hubspot.com/archive/seo-101-webinar
 

Search Engine Optimisation

below is a useful bit of search engine information from http://www.businessol.com/seo-blog/ by a guy called  Ray Comstock.

http://www.businessol.com/seo-blog/2008/06/single-most-important-seo-strategy-for.html for article


"Once you publish content, don't move it! What I mean is, don't change the URL where the content lives. I have recently had a client who has an internal content management and production system that causes URLs to move (change) after a certain amount if time. They couldn't understand why their search listings kept fluctuating so much. They have since developed a migration strategy for their content (which consists of setting up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one) in the event they have to change their URLs.

The point is though, changing your URLs disconnects your link connectivity unless you implement 301 redirects. Search engine rankings, especially those of Google are hugely dependent on links, especially relevant external links. But moving the content means that any links that you might have had, are no longer seen unless you implement a redirect. And even though 301 redirects work, they take time to do so and can quickly become tedious, if not difficult to manage. But make sure you use a 301 redirect (permanent) which passes Page Rank versus a 302 redirect (temporary and bad for SEO) which does not pass Page Rank. If you don't know what kind of redirect you have, use this http header check function on your URL with the redirect to find out.

The best idea though, is not changing the location of your content once its published.

Update: Please note that we are not saying that all missing pages should 301 to a certain page. Pages that do not really exist should still have error 404s and not 301s. Only moved pages that existed in an old URL should 301 to a new URL."