What is Online Marketing or Search Engine Optimization? Basically it is creating a website that can be indexed thoroughly by search engine robots, and is attractive to placement for particular sets of search criteria. Download our brochure here.

Back in the day (1990's - 2004) search engines used robots to look for new websites and to read those websites to find out what they were about. This was done with various degrees of success, and then Google showed up and searching the Internet became a viable means to acquire real information.

With Google came some real challenges to the Internet Marketing World. Most search engines then would look at the front page in the area called the HEADER section, where Keywords and Descriptions of the site were located. These Keywords and Descriptions were written by the webmaster and marketing minds of the website.

These HTML code areas were there as a means of giving the search engines information about the website, without having to design a website that the robots could easily search. Of course this was a fool's goal, website marketing minds, being what they are, soon learned that if you put in popular searches as your keywords, such as Britney Spears, then you showed up on result pages for popular searches, and the whole thing washed out.

Google, and the rebuilt engines to follow, ditched the HEADers and started going through the website pages themselves. Thus our first criteria became a real need; the website needed to be designed so that the search engine robots would find all of the pages. Several schemes came into being for this tactic, as the robots would only follow basic <A> Tag hyperlinks. Many SEO's today will still talk about redundant hyperlink schemes, html sitemaps and many other have to do requirements. They will talk about the problems with dynamic pages, databases, and PDF files.

None of these schemes could insure a full run of every page, because what the SEO's didn't tell you, is the search engines weren't going to run through every page to begin with.

With as many types of programming being developed to create websites, and the tendency for bots to get "tied up" inside a website, limits were always in place for how many pages the site would be searched and how long the bot would attempt to search for those pages. So if your programming was bad and the bot kept looping through five pages, when the timer ran out, the bot left the site (thinking it only had five pages). If your programming was perfect, it might look at 20 or 25 pages and leave anyway. All of that is history, what goes on today are XML sitemaps. Google came out with these in 2005, allowing you to submit a full index for your website, no matter what programming or menu systems you have created, to the search engine directly. No more worries about schemes and menu plans. You have complete control of what pages are indexed and which ones are not.

Yahoo has a similar tactic, only they don't use XML, they just ask for a text file listing all of the web pages on your site. You will also hear several myths about what types of pages can be indexed. For example it is touted that Flash pages can not be indexed, which hasn't been true for several years. Google, Yahoo, and Overture all index and read the text from Flash SWF files on websites. What the search engines can't read is text in Graphic format, for example a JPEG file that has your contact information on it; there's no way for the search engines to read that information.

The myth about dynamic pages not being able to be indexed; such as ASP, PHP, Perl and other pragmatically created websites isn't true either. I don't know of a dynamic website system that can be navigated with a browser, which the search engines can not read, and with the sitemap files, these become even easier for the search engines.