When developing a new Web site, Plexus purposefully constructs a search engine friendly foundation on which to build the site; however, even with a strong base the work to climb the engines has only begun. In order to optimize a Web site so that it comes up easily and near the top of search engine, a calculated plan of attack must be devised and carried out. And the plan must start with research.

Research is essential in order to determine a site's most searched keywords by consumers. For illustrative purposes only, take, for instance, a local agent's real estate Web site. One may think the keywords to optimize on should be the agent's name, the real estate company name and "athens real estate." But, after conducting the relevant research, we find that the most searched variations and therefore most applicable keywords for the site should be "athens homes", "residential real estate athens ga" and "home sales Athens."

Research is also integral when determining link popularity, especially in regards to the competition. In order to surpass your competition in the engines, you must first find out where they rank and how they got there. Thus, link popularity (one of the major factors in google's PageRank algorithm) – how many highly ranking sites link to your site – is a critical element. Link popularity is not easily obtained. A site owner must contact other site owners and convince them to "swap" links. However, a new site right out of the gate doesn’t have any PageRank so it is difficult to convince a site with a longer history and higher PageRank to swap links. A variety of tools are available to help your site gain link popularity and Plexus can help you find the best fit for your site.

For SEO, we recently began engaging the help of a new software that evaluates the rank of a site and tracks its climb as SEO activities are engaged. It monitors all of the keywords a site wishes to optimize on and tracks the progress.

If you are interested in learning more about search engine optimization and how it an help drive more traffic to your site, call Plexus at 706.353.2048 or visit our SEO service page.