One of the biggest challenges for new website owners is to build a product that people are interested in, and one that will be structured and organized so that search engines will be able to navigate that site easily, index new content, and direct natural traffic (visitors) its way. Often, website owners will contract the services of seach engine optimization (SEO) professionals to streamline the website, building on its strengths to make it more attractive to search engines.

However, an even bigger challenge is finding a true SEO specialist to perform the work, as it seems anyone who has an Internet connection and knows how to submit a website to a search engine considers himself an "SEO expert".

Personally, I do all of my own website building work. I use established practices, read up on new innovations, and dedicate myself to hours of long work and study, building and improving, adapting and readapting, writing and rewriting to build and maintain products that will attract visitors, and provide a rewarding visitor experience. But those who have the money but not the time look to Internet agents or agencies to fulfill the tasks of streamlining websites that search engines like, in order to obtain top results for keywords and niches, ones that will bring in the right visitors and customers.

Unfortunately, the Internet is flooded with those who know nothing about optimization, but everything about taking your money. They post in webmaster forums claiming an expertise in something they themselves having only just started to do themselves. They figure that adding a few links to a website and flooding its pages with keywords or spamming forums is the only thing they need to do to fulfill the SEO needs of their customers.

Directory submissions can be a long and tiresome process, even if you have tools that reduce your cutting-and-pasting. While adding your websites to directories is a no-cost method of adding backlinks to your site, there is still the inherent cost to you measured in time.

Outsourcing directory submissions is a challenging and often frustrating experience. To be honest, there are few "trusted" directory submission services, as most will often state that they are "manual" submissions, however in truth, they are often using automated directory submitters, as the key to making money for them is in volume. Even for them, there is no simple method of getting a lot of submissions done in a short amount of time.

Other services will simply submit to their own networks of cloned directories, sometimes as many as a couple of hundred duplicated sites with only a separate domain name to distinguish them. Now, there's hardly any value in these services, however some will argue that "a link is a link is a link".

I've read on a few forums where people discuss the strength of a ".com" site over ".net", ".org", etc., and when it comes to search engine value, it doesn't appear that it makes any difference as to SEO, and more people emphasize that the value is place more on the keyword in the domain name, which makes good search engine sense.

The perception is more offline than online, where businesses, companies, and other entities try to obtain the dot.com version of their name as it has more weight as a tangible brand. In the world of domain selling and buying, it seems there is more attraction to the dot.com as well, maybe more for type-in traffic or other standardization.

One thing that all webmasters have in common is that they all want to be at the top of the search engine results for their specific category, topic, or niche (I have yet to meet one that doesn't). Higher search engine results equate to better web presence, which amounts to more traffic directed to that website, which ultimately is one of the webmaster's main goals. A website without traffic or visitors is like a store without a sign or a front door.

We can probably all agree that utilizing search engine optimization (SEO) methods that can improve one's results in said search engines is a task worth undertaking. For if a website is built with proper web-friendly design, esthetics, and coding, the spiders and robots that visit your website and analyze your content will have an easier time indexing all of your pages, your titles, and the keywords that best represent what type of business you are in.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Usually, the earlier a website is presented in the search engine's results, or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.