The following is one of the best-of from students in David Toliver’s Georgetown School of Continuing Studies Interactive Marketing class. The following post is by Stephanie Spano, Marketing and Communications Manager at Engility Corporation.

Web design is one of the aspects of marketing I enjoy the most. Working closely with graphic artists to develop new banners and graphics is a creative and fun way to visually promote company capabilities. Updating and creating new content keeps a website fresh, grabs the viewer’s attention, and ensures frequent re-visits. The creative side of web design lets the imagination run wild, like a seven-year-old kid pretending to live in Oz, not Kansas.

Since my days starting out as a Newbie Marketer, I have learned that there is a whole other side to web design besides creating engaging graphics and content. Sadly, it is not the actual Wizard of Oz behind the web design curtain. It is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  Read on for a basic overview of the key ways to get this hidden force to work for your business.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a broad discipline of Internet Marketing used to promote websites. A popular and well known strategy within this discipline is SEO. Ever wonder why the results are displayed in a particular order when you conduct a search in Google, Yahoo! or Bing? SEO is the answer. SEO will help you promote your business by increasing your website’s visibility in search engines.  There are three basic “behind the curtain” aspects of SEO to keep in mind that will help you develop more effective graphics and content for your website to improve its ranking.

1. Not So Creepy Crawlers (Think Charlotte’s Web, not Arachnophobia)

Search Engines operate by sending out millions of bots, commonly known as “spiders,” to crawl the web’s 30+ billion pages and index its content. Information gathered by the spiders is stored in gigantic datacenters all across the world. When you conduct a search query, the indexed information is pulled from these datacenters in fractions of seconds. Read the rest of this entry »