It can be very tempting to measure the success of your search engine optimization strategies by the position of your web site in search engine results. If you rank at the top spot, then it is obvious that you will receive a lot of traffic. This means that your search engine optimization strategy has worked, right? Not necessarily.

A lot depends on the specific key word for which your search engine ranking is accessed. If you haven’t done your keyword research properly and if you have covered the right set of key words, then a top rank in search engine results will not only result in more traffic but in more traffic of qualified customers.

On the other hand, if your website ranks high for a completely unrelated keyword, then it is obvious that you will receive a lot of traffic but very little would be converted into sales and hard cash.

Does this mean that combining smarter keyword research with good SEO strategies will be sufficient to earn lots of money? Remember, the function of SEO is to bring customers to your website. The function of any advertisement in a newspaper or on the television is to attract customers to your store. You will have to provide a fantastic and excellent shopping experience to not just win their business but to create customer loyalty and good will.

This means that focusing on SEO alone and providing very poor customer satisfaction is only going to hamper your chances of earning profits. You may receive a lot of traffic and a healthy percentage may even get converted into sales. However, lack of good will and reputation will obviously work against you.

It is just a question of time before customers stop visiting a web site despite it being ranked high in search engine results. Hence, mere SEO and keyword research is not enough to make your website successful.

If you want your website to be ranked high by search engines, you will have to focus not just on proper optimization but also on proper set up of the website. Search engine optimization performs the task of attracting visitors to your website. However, its role ends when visitors enter the site.

From that point onwards, it is the irresponsibility of your web design team to impress potential customers. Needless to say, search engine optimizations should cover these aspects as well. If there are broken links in your website, it is obviously going to reflect poorly on your design capacity.

No search engine will be interested in rating your website high when it is not been designed properly. The end result will be that your website will be ranked low despite your best efforts to improve using optimization techniques.

Broken link happens to be the most obvious reason why your website would rank low in search engine results. The layout of the website also matters a lot. Of course, whether your layout is easy to use or not is a subjective issue.

However, there are certain basic points that each and every web designer should keep in mind to ensure proper search engine optimization. The layout of the site should flow in a logical manner.

If you introduce the product to your customer and then move on to numerous other products before giving the option of buying the same, it is obvious that the visitor would move on to some other website.

The proper arrangement of the pages can be understood from the manner in which the Meta tags are prepared. The idea is to treat the website just as you would treat a store. The checkout counter is normally placed near the exit so that the task of paying the cash and moving out is done without any difficulty. The same logic should be applied to your website as well.

Content is the most important aspect of search engine optimization and marketing. However, people make the mistake of thinking that text is the only form of content that can improve page ranking. Well, what about images and videos? At first glance, using images and videos seem irrelevant as far as search engine ranking is concerned. The bots used by search engines scour the text for keywords and rank the pages accordingly.

Well, the name of the video or image affixed to a web page can be modified to include the keyword. If the visitors like the image, they have the option of linking the same to their blog or any social networking website.

In fact, chances of images and videos being tagged and linked and shared is a lot higher than mere text alone. Needless to say, linkages with other websites of same or higher page ranking will automatically boost the ranking of the website in consideration.

This is the reason why images and videos are very important. A single image that is shared many times will have the same effect as lot of text shared by different individuals once.

Of course, the cost of designing the image and fixing is a lot less as compared to the cost of preparing good quality content related to the website.

Hence, it is important to consider the latest media options like videos, audio files, and images and even pod casts to improve your search engine ranking.   You can easily upload these types of files with programs like File Zilla.  Needless to say, this has revolutionized the way in which websites are designed.

Plain old text created with programs like openoffice continues to dominate but it is now forced to accommodate videos and images on the web page. In fact, there are many websites that focus solely on getting the message across through videos. They are getting good SEO results and are earning more for less effort.