In these challenging economic times, business leaders are striving to stretch their marketing dollars as far as possible.  More and more, companies are turning to the Internet to market their business in order to bring in more revenue.

A poorly ranked website with low traffic volume is the first challenge most businesses face.

Probably the most-talked about subject to rank higher today is SEO. While many companies are aware of the term, most don’t have the correct understanding of SEO for their website.

So what is “SEO" really?

On Wikipedia SEO explained as "the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results."

Search Engine Land describes it as "the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines."

To sum it up it's a deliberate attempt to help search engines (Google, BING, Yahoo etc.) index and categorize a website for search results with an aim to drive more traffic to a website. 'Natural', 'Free' or 'Organic' means it shows up on it's own merit within the top pages of results when specific keywords are typed in for search.

Progressive marketing managers are discovering that when effectively implemented, SEO is the key element to allow their website to be found. When your web pages have higher rankings, you are more visible to a greater audience. In fact, a recent study found that effective SEO was associated with a 10 per cent traffic increase and a five position hike in organic search rank.

How do Search Engines work?

Since the early days of internet, search engines have evolved and developed numerous algorithms to determine a website's relevance to a search query. A program bot such as 'Googlebot' frequently crawls the internet to index a website in the right category based these algorithms. The main goal of search engines is to serve their customer "The Searcher" and present the best possible matches to his/her query. Good SEO helps search engines understand what each web page is about so it can serve it back when relevant searches are made.

SEO is not something you do once!

It is important for company executives and marketing managers to be aware that SEO is not a “one-time” function. It is an ongoing and complex process. Here is Google's starter guide to Serach Engine Optimization to help you with your efforts.

But remember! Just having more traffic to your website does not gurantee leads. Although its the first step towards it.