If you are new to the concepts and practical applications of marketing through effective search engine optimization start with a quick survey of your website. You can get a pretty good idea by asking yourself a few questions built around this basic concept: Do I have an SEO friendly website?

Do I Have A Search Engine Friendly Website?

Success with search engine marketinging involves far more that what we will cover here. In fact many of factors that hav the most impact on you search engine optimization success take place completely apart from you website. But that is another story...

Your websites structure, organization and code will have a significant part to play in getting your site higher ranking on the search engine results pages. Here are a few questions to ask yourself as you take a quick tour around your site:

1. Is the navigation of my site navigation easy to figure out at a glance or does it take some thought or experimentation to figure out where to click? When people come to your site, do they know where to go next? Search engine friendly navigational structure includes:
1. creating a clear path or links to the most common or most used pages/destinations for the average user (search engines use these same paths to find and index your pages)
2. Clear path or links to the websites goals: product purchase, gathering leads for email follow-up, register to access content and so on.
3. Using keywords in navigation to give search engine robots guidance on what the destination page is all about. **VERY IMPORTANT** and often overlooked. For example: do you use links that say go here (bad- no information offered) instead of intuitive links like computer engineering classes (good - contains information about destination page)
2. Can you easily update your website on your own? Or do you have to call your web site designer up ito make a change and then wait until he or she gets around to updating it (and pay an hourly charge for your troubles)? This matters because successful search engine optimization is all about content and lots of it. If you can’t add it quicly and on the fly you are going to get bogged dowon an fail to attract the search engine traffic you want.
3. Is your site using well written page titles, keyword rich page description meta tags and targeted keywords? These more technical aspects of creating SEO friendly website content are easiy overlooked whether our site pages are static or dynamic.
4. Does your site have an Google compliant XML sitemap? If not... why not!
   
5. Are you able to access and review information on how many people visited your site this month, where they came from and what keywords they searched to find you?

If you cannot honestly answer a resounding YES to most of these questions, there is a good chance you do not have an SEO friendly website and are missing out on the life blood of online succes... organic search traffic!