Having an online presence is all well and good. Having a successful online presence, a profile that delivers SEO Listings and fulfils defined business objectives such as enhancing your organisation's reputation, generating sales, votes, downloads and real return on investment is altogether a different matter.
It's clear to all that these days to effectively promote your business online you need your website to be at the top of the major search engines (SEO Listings). Nearly 80% of users abandon their search if the first 3 pages don't provide an answer to their question. 28% don't even consider scrolling past the 2nd page of results. Such is the importance of high listing that traffic derived from top SEO Listings can be between 100 and 1,000 times that of occupying 30th place in the rankings.

There are over 8 billion web searches a month in the USA alone with Google blazing a trail providing 60% of them. Clearly the audience is there and with over £46.6bn generated online by UK's online retailers in 2007 it appears that the much anticipated e-commerce culture has finally arrived and arrived big. The key for businesses of course is to get their products and services to the fore, to get above the Internet 'noise'. If your Search Engine Optimisation isn't driving your site to the top of the SEO Listings, then it's your competitors who are enjoying top billing and the associated advantages.

When it comes to search engines there are essentially Two Ways Of Achieving SEO Listings - the first through what is referred to as natural or organic SEO Listings. High natural SEO Listings are achieved through well-deployed strategic keyword research and website optimization. Organic search results (also known as natural search results) are ranked according to how useful the search engines find site's content - the relevance of a page against the search term.

The second way your website can achieve SEO Listings is with paid listings that appear on search results pages in the form of sponsored links in the hot spots right and to the top of pages. Though paid listings in the form of pay per click (PPC) Internet marketing can yield targeted results quickly and are more manageable for website owners than natural Search Engine Optimisation, a Jupiter Media study found that 5 out of 6 commercial purchases came from the organic search results rather than paid ads. The appeal of organic SEO Listings being that web users generally are not keen to be 'sold to', believing rightly or wrongly that natural SEO Listings offer more useful and authentic information.

Clearly, natural, organic SEO Listings are a critical component of any Internet marketing campaign - generating high volumes of traffic, business goals and return on investments. Most organisations seek professional partners when developing and deploying an Internet marketing campaign, the pursuit of high organic listings the basis of the multi-million dollar SEO industry.

Despite what some Search Engine Optimisation agencies will tell you or what you may read there are no software products that can automate the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) process. There are no software products that can automate copywriting, coding or analysis. To achieve SEO Listings that generate real returns it takes Experience, Skill, Patience And Know How.

Achieving high-ranking search engine listing through Search Engine Optimisation is a process - an ongoing evolution of technological and business application. There are a number of stages that need to be covered.

Planning
This is the business objectives stage of the process, the foundation of any Search Engine Optimisation campaign. Depending on the aims and objectives of the campaign, suitable keywords need to be defined - a semantic base for the campaign that maps out business objectives in relation to your target audience - keywords and keyword phrases are deployed that will attract the search engine spiders. Spiders will index the site on terms that relate to the desired audience and lead to the call to action. Well-defined search terms deliver suitable visitors likely to convert into leads, customers and ROI.

Preparation
The integration of content and structure. Use a content management system or supporting site architecture to represent the campaign's semantic space with the creation of Keyword Richfields of information. Copy should be written to a high standard and prove interesting, informative and engaging to readers. Semantically relevant information should be included highest up the site hierarchy using structural elements - heading, paragraph and other HTML tags - indicating importance.

The site should fast loading and search engine friendly. It should be optimised using clean, current standard compliant HTML with code that might create obstacles to spiders amended. After all, if search engines cannot retrieve the data (based on crawling errors from bots, poor site architecture or otherwise) the site's not going to rank highly.

Link Building
Global Link Popularity is arguably the most important Search Engine Optimisation criteria. Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines love to see sites that have quality Incoming Links from other relevant sites. Topical relevance pays an extremely important role in determining link value. The closer the relevance between sites from the same industry or niche, content between the sites, keywords used to link to and from the two sites and each site's relevance on shared keywords can infer on the target site additional authority. Internal linking is also of value especially if the site has a degree of authority.

Test
Track traffic to your site from each search engine keywords and monitor positions on each search engine. If you targeted a series of keywords and built a coherent series of pages on the site, with strong internal linking and IP diverse external links then you should have hopefully created enough relevance to deliver rewarding results.

It's also vital to measure audience response - are visitors to the site fulfilling the call to action, buying, registering or doing whatever the campaign is designed for them to do when they get there?

Refinement
Changes and modifications are based on recorded data. If the website isn't ranking or not ranking highly it may be necessary to re-evaluate the keyword saturation, develop and/or stylise more content. It may be that case that additional authority need be sought to augment the sites reputation. Alternatively we also make recommendations that will make the most of increased site traffic, maximizing conversion rates.