We've begun a pretty in-depth analysis of SEO best practices and ways to help our site and our clients' sites rank higher in the organic search results for their particular keywords. So readers of our Blog can expect to see more on this subject over the next few weeks or the next month. Let's start with some basics:

• Keyword choice is critical - must be relevant to the content and purpose of the site, and must be a term or phrase people search for.
• Page titles are important - and should include your top keyword or phrase.
• Page descriptions are also important - and should include your top keyword or phrase.
• Content is critical - relevant, useful, and fresh copy is KING. If you do get ranked on page 1 of Google, you won't stay there without new content being consistently added.
• On-site Links - must be crawl-able. Your site must be search engine friendly so the spiders and robots can crawl the pages and index them by following your text links. Your links should also include your relevant keywords whenever possible.
• Link popularity is critical - while reciprocal links are important, inbound links from relevant sources is critical for maintaining your high ranking on Google and others.

SEO is a huge topic that we've decided to spend a lot of time and effort on in the first part of 2008. Today, we've just scratched the very surface of the subject. Watch for more information and a few future Articles on our site. As a part of your advertising budget, your overall marketing plan, and definitely your website design and development, Search Engine Optimization is a must-have. We'll talk more about creating a search engine friendly website during development, what to do if your site was not optimized when it was created, and what you can do in-house once your website is live and optimized to improve or maintain a high organic (unpaid) ranking on the top search engines. Inspired 2 Design, LLC