While we touched on it yesterday, I wanted to discuss the value of winning awards as it relates to search engine optimization.

 As all online marketers know by now, ranking high in search engine results is critical to driving low cost traffic to your Website.  Search engines want to provide the user with the most appropriate search results in order to have their search engine used again.  What makes a site appear high in the results is a closely held secret at both Google and Yahoo, but is boils down to relevancy.  One factor that is used by search engines is page rank, a calculation based on the number of non-related pages that link to your site.  Ever wonder why you get so much spam that want to "exchange links", it's because they are trying to improve their page rank. 

Winning Awards is a great way to link your site another relevant site. Award sites usually have a high page rank because of all of the sites that link back to them, so having them link to you will help your position in the all important search engines.

It is also important to issue a press release using distribution services such as PRWeb when you win an award.  This provides another outside link to your site helping to increase the relevancy in the search engines.  It also provides additional content for the search engine to catalog and provide to potential customers looking for information on your organization.