Search Engines by Jon Roberts Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the key to getting your website noticed on the internet by your diving customers. The way search engines see your website is critical to understanding how to gain higher places, get more hits and increase diver acquisition. A good basic selling idea, involvement and relevancy, of course, are as important as ever, but in the advertising din of today, unless you make yourself noticed and believed, you ain't got nothin'. Leo Burnett – Advertising Executive behind The Jolly Green Giant and the Pillsbury Doughboy. In the last article we discussed eBusiness and introduced you to the basics of SEO. In this article we will advance your knowledge and get to grips with social media and the opportunities they can bring you. The Googlebot             Search engines regularly visit websites using a program called a spider, Googlebot or WebCrawler amongst others. Their job is to simply gather data about your site in a limited amount of time, time which cannot afford to be wasted. On a complicated menu driven site, you can waste valuable time as the spider looks for data, dead ends, broken links, and primarily confusing pathways through your website will cause the spider to long abandon its journey before it has gathered enough information. Like Father Christmas, it cannot hang around too long as it has millions of more ‘houses’ to visit!              The way to envisage this would be to compare the search engine to a 3 year old child who is just exploring the world around them. A search engine does not know what you do on the first few visits, normally every 3 to 4 days, but gains a little information each time. The very best you can hope for on a brand new website is results with 6 weeks, but a lot of you may never see results on your current website ever, simply because it does not have some very basic functions. It looks great, but has no functionality, or it looks great but the competition has taken over you. What you need to make sure is that your website is SEO primed, and to do this the perfect website should have the following: Geo-location. This is the frequent use of the town, city, county or country you are operating from in your content. The web does not know your address. Clean URLs that are geo-located and relevant to diving.  www.bluedolphin.com/padiowd.html is not good, but www.bluedolphin.com/diving/openwater/mexico is.  Do not build in multi-layers to get to your core information. Try to imagine that you are new user to your website, is it simple to navigate? Make the page titles match the URLs, and the content. Do not be frightened to repeat key words such as PADI, scuba, diving and your location. This is what users’ type into search engines. Try to support your site with relevant articles, extra non-core information on local attractions and perhaps a diary on what’s happening locally. Support your site with a YouTube channel, Facebook fan page, Twitter, etc. The 6th point on the above list refers to what is now becoming a critical part of getting not only more indirect business, but proving to search engines that you are non-static. Social Networking, love it or hate it, is here to stay (ok, for now) and investing time to growing it is nearly as important as getting your website perfect. In the next article some tips and tricks on getting connected.