This week, my colleagues Aubrae and Katie are exchanging valuable information with other leaders in the search engine marketing/ search engine optimization fields at SES London (Search Engine Strategies Conference). I am in the 10Best Solutions Greenville office eagerly reading articles, presentations, listening to interviews on YouTube etc. from SES London in attempts to vicariously attend the conference through my reading and communication with those in attendance.

One of the SEO-Chicks, Judith Lewis presented at SES on the topic “Introduction to Search.” Lewis’s research showed that everyday, search engines receive over 20 million queries for search—making it the number one activity online (excluding email and instant messaging). Another astounding statistic is that 80% of users find new websites/ companies through searches. These statistics have major online implications for your business. If those searching the web cannot find your business through search engines (really it needs to be in the top 10 on Google, Yahoo or others), then you are going to lose business to competitors. One of the best ways to make your website visible online is through SEO, or search engine optimization and link-building.

According to a Search Engine Journal, 72.3 percent of Google users and 60.8 percent of Yahoo! Users chose natural search results as more relevant than a paid listing. How do you make your site content relevant to search engines, or SEO friendly?

Here are several SEO must-haves for a good website:

• Well-written, interesting content
• Integrated, optimized keywords to attract those who are searching for your product
• Limited use of Flash technology so that engines can crawl your site more easily
• Having direct links from other websites or getting listed in a directory
• Clear meta data and optimized header tags
• Logical site architecture
• Make sure even your images contain relevant keywords
• Linking pages to XML site maps so spiders can crawl all available pages

If 90% of the market share uses Google and 72.3% of Google users prefer organic search results, getting your site indexed through SEO is worth the money to increase business and gain visibility on the web.