Yes. However, if you are an Avenue Web Media client there is nothing left to do in terms of site optimization. All our sites are built from the ground up taking into account all the search engine ranking factors. The only thing you need to worry about is creating good content for your visitors.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and refers to the practice of optimizing our site to be as search-engine friendly as possible.

A search-engine friendly site is one that takes into account all the search engine ranking factors to make sure search engines have no problems visiting, crawling, understanding and making the most out of our site.

No – and yes. We can't control the search engines (nobody can). To stay in business, search engines must offer the best results or risk losing their users to the competition, so companies like Google and Yahoo will not tamper with the quality of their organic results for money or any other commercial incentive. The only way to rank high is to naturally convince the search engines that our site is the best result for a particular query.

A lot of big and small things go into calculating search engine rankings. For instance, Google claims they use over 200 factors to determine the position of sites in their results.

Some of the most important factors can be guessed using common sense. Considering that search engines are actively trying to rank quality sites higher to offer the best possible results to users, it is assumed that anything that improves the perceivable quality of our site and pages will improve the site's rankings.

It depends on the marketing effort... and common knowledge will vary greatly - we've had to argue with “professionals” that say it takes 6 months to appear in Google.

In our experience, when executing a proper marketing campaign, new sites take between 2-5 days to show up in Google and 3-7 days to show up in Yahoo.

However, establishing good rankings takes a lot longer. Depending on the marketing effort, sites can start seeing good traffic within the first couple of weeks, but it will take 3-4 months to secure good rankings.

No. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo have submission forms but these are pointless. For your site to appear in their rankings it must have some level of reputation online via several factors such as in-bound links (IBL) and good content on your site. If these things are not in place, submitting to a search engine will do no good because whether search engines know of your site or not, they will not rank it.