By Paul Lima

Rank high in search engine results, and your business could climb. Take the SEO (search engine optimization) quiz. This test will help you discover whether you're taking enough steps to rise above the crowd. Answer True or False to each of the following statements:

1. My company has submitted its website to popular search engines for indexing
2. My company has paid listing fees to selected search engines* to expedite indexing
3. We have to the best of our ability determined the key words and phrases that prospective customers would use to search for our site
   
4. Our website meta tags (description and keywords) include the key words and phrases that prospective customers would use when searching for our products and/or services
5. The title tag on each web page includes key words and phrases appropriate to each page
   
6. On each page, our website content and hyper-links use key words and phrases that prospective customers would use when searching for our products and/or services
7. Our site has a search term analytic tool that lets us analyze the terms that visitors use in search engines to search for our site
8. We alter our meta tags and content, where appropriate, based on the terms visitors use to find our site
   
9. Our website home page includes a link to a text-based site map, which helps search engines find all of our web pages
10. Because search engines cannot read graphics, we use text descriptions (alt text) to accompany all graphics (e.g., logos) and images (e.g. product shots) on our site
11. Our alt text that accompanies graphics and images uses appropriate key words and phrases
    
12. My firm does not fill Web pages and page descriptions with superfluous keywords, to avoid penalization by popular search engines
13. Our associates, associations, business partners and others link from their sites to our site, which improves rankings by some search engines (e.g., Google)
14. We supplement our SEO efforts with pay-per-click ads that display in search results only when our keywords are used
15. We have a blog that provides useful information for our prospective clients and update it at least once a week
16. We ensure we sprinkle key words and phrase in a way that makes linguistic sense throughout our blog entries
    
17. We regularly monitor our search engine performance and refine our SEO for the best results

How did you do? The more Trues, the better optimized your site is and the higher it will rank in search engine results.

* Some search engines, such as Google, will not let you buy a listing; they will, however, sell you Pay Per Click ads that appear beside the free listings.


Paul Lima is a freelance writer, writing coach and author of Do You Know Where Your Website Ranks? Visit him online at www.paullima.com.