Search engines, like Google, Yahoo! and MSN are a constantly changing creature and if you want to get and stay on top, you need to adjust and maintain your website to their specifications. Web Monopoly, a Web Marketing and Design Firm with branches in South Florida and Southern California, has experienced web optimization experts on staff, commited to mastering techniques that will see your website achieve and keep higher web placement.

Do I have to pay for listings?

Most search engines offer some sort of paid placement. You may have heard of Google Adwords, for example. Most of our clients utilize this and other similar programs to supplement their traffic, but we often see tons of money wasted on improper keyword selection and improper bidding. Web Monopoly specializes in optimizing and overseeing paid placement and pay-per-click campaigns to get the most possible out of your budget.

What about the free listings?

Sites that will see true long-term success will do this through organic search, also known as "the free listings". Site optimization to tailor your web pages for the search engines takes several months, but once ranking, the return on investment is much greater than any form of paid placement. While each website is different, the general path that most sites must take in order to see increased placement is:

Keyword Research and Analysis
Many sites optimize their sites for the wrong keywords. While it may seem like a trivial step, if you do not take the proper care in choosing your keyword terms, all of your other efforts will be in vain. Web Monopoly uses specialized keyword analysis software to not only determine the most popularly searched keyword phrases, but also the keywords which are least competative, giving you a good understanding of your niche and which keyword terms to target first.

Ensuring Your Site is Search Engine Friendly
Unfortunately, just because your site is aestheically pleasing to web surfers doesn't mean that the search engines will find it easy to read. Search engines use crawling programs called "spiders" to enter and index your site. Certain types of code, common in many shopping cart solutions and graphic navigations, prohibit search engines from successfully browsing the site's content. Web Monopoly is experienced with alternative navigations, graphic work-arounds, and URL re-write modules to make the web experience enjoyable for the human end-user, as well as the search engine robot.

Content and Tagging
Search engines collect every word on your site and rank you for terms based on a secret algorithm. While this algorithm is always changing and nobody knows the exact formula, what we do know is that the keyword density and keyword-rich text, coupled with highlights of these terms in your site's meta-tags helps your site rank better. Web Monopoly first optimizes your existing text and meta tags based on existing site content, then, as the campaign progresses, creates additional focused content pages to better rank for the variations of these keywords in searches.

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