Your website is useless if no one knows it exists. If you want your website to be an effective marketing tool, it needs to be found and listed at the top of search results from search engines like Google^TM and Yahoo^TM. Our team has been optimizing websites for search engine discovery and ranking since 2003.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) may seem like rocket science, but all that is needed is little knowledge, a little logic, and a dedicated amount of time. Time is the key.

If you have time, you can acquire the knowledge. Once you have the knowledge, then you need more time to make your website both search engine friendly and popular. These efforts really go hand in hand.

First, You set up the code that builds your website to make it search engine friendly. Any professional website developer will know how to create HTML links and meta tags that are effective for SEO. Most will also tell you that page content/text needs to be relevant for the search terms/keywords that are important to your business.

Since the above practices are well-known, popularity becomes even more important (parents of teenagers please forgive us). Popluarity generates traffic and links to your website. In a nutshell, traffic and links are important because they result in higher search engine ranking and position.

There are many way to increase popularity of your website. The first method is already taken care of if you've done your search engine homework and created relevant content on your webpages. Other methods include adding interactive, user-based content, such as blogs or forums.

In a nutshell, if people find your website interesting, they will return to it, refer others to it, and hopefully, liink to it. If nothing else, remember that good content = popularity = links = high listing in search engine results = more visibility = more business!

Again, if you have the time, SEO is definitely something you can manage on your own. But, as we all know, time is money. So, you must decide for yourself if you have the time to learn and put into action SEO practices, or if it makes more sense for you to hire someone who can hit the ground running, and save you the time.

One word of caution: there are a bundle of other tricks that people employ to outsmart the search engine robots. However, the search engine companies keep an eye out for these tricks, and you risk getting blacklisted if you cross the line. So, when performing SEO for your website, or paying someone else to do it, be sure that you don't violate the ever-changing search engine rules, or you may end up disappearing from their search results lists.

If you decide to get some assistance, we hope that you will give JS Web an opportunity to help you get found by Google^TM, Yahoo^TM, and more importantly, by your future customers.