Marketing a website is perhaps the most critical part part of an online business. As with a physical business, if there is no advertising or marketing, the business usually fails. There are millions of websites all over the internet with excellent products, but no way to find them. Search Engine Optimization (getting a website listing at the top of the results for Google, Yahoo, MSN(Bing)) is one of the best long-term solutions to attract customers. What search engines are looking for is the same thing consumers are looking for in a business in the real world: an established business that has been around for awhile, is reputable, other people say good things about it, and refer friends to it when they have a good experience. A website is the same model. When visitors come to a site, they expect and want it to be a reputable site that represents a real business with a real person (or business) behind it. When other websites (or businesses) link (refer) to a good site, it helps their 'score'. The more inventory (pages) the site has, the more customers will have something to look at while they are there, and eventually give them enough information to buy. When inventory changes a lot (page updates), that means they are still in business and they are modifying their inventory to match the current market trends and needs of their customers.

8TEM helps business owners establish a reputable business, keep building inventory, and update it to the needs of the customer. While this is happening, the search engines notice every change and records it. We then go out and find other websites for referrals (get inbound links). The more consistent these methods are, the more the site is looked upon as being trustable (one of the major hurdles of ranking). Once the trust is established, you just keep building your 'brand' from there and support your customers.

SEO is primarily four parts: backend code, number of pages (inventory), age (time in business), and inbound links (referrals). Organic SEO helps local SEO (city based) by implementing the same keyword strategies that keep the same 'theme' of the site so that the algorithms of each search are consistent.

Keywords must be specific to the business and can not be general. The more specific it is, the better the results of that traffic. It is recommended to have at least three words in the phrase (mexican restaurant, minneapolis). Two word phrases are generally too broad. Keywords are important to have before starting the site, as we use them to build the site. The keywords are used to create page names (mexican_restaurant_minneapolis.html) as well as image names and body text. Once all these components match, it gives the site an overall theme that helps the search engines and people to the site.

Since there are different keywords which are more competetive than others, a different strategy is involved for different industries. You can estimate how much work is necessary to gain rankings in search engines by using the following form below. The first section will indicate the amount of inbound links, the second is the amount of pages Google has indexed, and the third will indicate when the archive saw it come online (first year that has a valid page). A new window will popup showing inbound links, the number of pages, and age.