From a small local business in a town to a big industry playing on an international platform, marketing has been a prime tool for any company or business to succeed. People started with using tools like write-ups, references, pamphlets and much more to convey their means or advertise themselves among a group. But now is a time where everything happens just on the click of your finger. And in this time is required marketing at the speed of light, marketing with niche concepts that are applied even before a common man would think.

With the time we are moving from a physical world to a virtual world. Companies started building up their websites to have a presence in the virtual world. But likewise there are billions of websites. What would be your identity then? In this age of Internet and Technology, getting your business visible to your customer segment is more important and this is where the Search Engine Optimization comes into picture. Building up a website is like making a saw and optimizing your website is like sharpening that saw to use.

And it is quite logical that you cannot take optimum use of your saw without sharpening it. Search Engines are a system through which one gets the information the later wants. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines through search results.

Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. In simple words, Search engine optimization (SEO) just means your site is as accessible as possible to the search engines to improve the chances that they will serve it up when your potential customers type in specific search terms (called keywords). The more easily search engines find your site, the higher up it appears on their results pages. In this world, SEO is definitely a smart move for any business. But getting your site ranked for your keywords, there are many aspects that play a key role: a proper site structure, clean coding and necessary keywords, to name a few.

This requires the every page of your website to be optimized. Every page should have a proper title, genuine keywords and a perfect description that matches the page. These title, keywords and description have to be relevant for every individual page. Search engines "crawl" the Web looking for the keywords that their users enter, so putting those keywords throughout your site means your pages will be picked up during searches by the search engine. Hence you have to put your foot into your customer's shoe to understand what keywords your customer would use to search for a particular product or service.

You have to learn your customers' mind and this will give you the best of Title and meta (Keywords and description) to optimize your website. Also, optimizing your content is equally important as that plays an important role. You may optimize your content with putting keywords in your content, giving the Heading tags to titles, giving bold effects wherever necessary, giving links (to phrases in the content) to internal pages wherever appropriate. Also, other activities to rank up your website in search engines are submitting your website URL into more and more search engines, adding your website URL into online directories, building up links with other relevant business sites, submitting rich articles into article sites, submitting your blog pages into various blog sites, submitting Press Releases into various Press Release sites. This will both increase the traffic overall to your site and enhance your search engine rankings, since the search engines pick up on the number of times people link to and from your site and rank your website higher accordingly.

People try many techniques to boost up their website ranking in these search engines for the specific keywords. People make researches to add-on their skills to make this task easier, faster and more genuine. There are companies that provide services for SEO to other companies. We at Semaphore Software (www.

semaphore-software.com) have a dedicated team that researches on the SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) activities and undertake projects to upgrade the website ranking for our clients from different businesses. It has become very important to move ahead with the fast pace if you wish to survive your business in this global competition.

Ghanshyam Shah is working in offshore software development & Website design