Most business owners nowadays know how important it is to have a website. A professional, attractive website helps you convey the right image for your business. It provides information that your customers are looking for. And it sends the message that your company is serious. But if your purpose of having a website is simply to have an internet presence for your customers than you are overlooking a very important advantage of having that website.

You can use it to bring you new business. From people who likely have never even heard about your company but is looking for exactly what you are selling.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the very complex process of getting search engines, like Google, to show a link to your website more often when someone is searching for something that your business offers.

To illustrate the art of SEO, we will use an example of a plumbing business in Vancouver owned by Sam. Sam wants a new website built and wants his site to appear when someone Googles “vancouver plumbing”. How is this achieved?

When someone enters into Google the search terms “Vancouver plumbing” almost 5 million results are available. How does Google determine which site takes 1st place? 2nd place? 57th place?

In order to determine the order in which websites show up for any specific search term, Google uses an algorithm, or formula. This algorithm takes into account many factors that Google feels makes the user experience better for their searchers. This formula is a tightly held secret, but through many years of experience the web industry has a pretty good idea of what the most important factors are. What separates a good SEO website from a great one is the ability of the web designer to build a technically solid website taking as much factors into account as possible when building the website. And this is what we do at VWD.

It has been estimated that Google considers about 200 factors that affect how a website ranks but of course nobody knows for sure other than Google themselves. In general Google looks at

• The words and pictures used on the webpage
• The age of the domain
• The size of the website
• The links coming from other websites
• The links going to other sites
• The links within the website
• The structure of the website
• Whether the website is secure
• The speed that a webpage loads
• The connection speed of the hosting

This is just to name a few of the more obvious factors.