Whether you are a small company servicing a limited regional area with your business or an international corporation with satellites offices/stores on every continent, if you have a website you need to maintain your SEO practices. Even if you have the advantage of a recognizable brand name built up over the years, when an Internet user types a keyword into Google, the search engine isn’t going to care if your company is worth five dollars or five billion. If you site is not properly optimized for that keyword, it will not rank high in results.

Let’s take for example a recent SEO situation with fast-food monarch Burger King. Their latest television campaign involves a blind taste test using people who allegedly have never eaten a hamburger in their lives, and all the broadcast opinions point to the Whopper. Burger King attaches a website to each commercial, for www.WhopperVirgins.com. Sounds reasonable, but viewers with short memories may not remember the URL, and search Google or Yahoo for “Whopper Virgin.” What comes up? Not Burger King.

According to an article in Advertising Age, it is Burger King’s apparent lack of SEO tactics that may have foiled their “Whopper Virgins” campaign. Searches on “whopper virgin” may lead to a parked domain called whoppervirgin.com, showing ads for Virgin Mobile and other unrelated sites. At this writing, however, a search on this keyword leads to numerous articles posted on the Internet pointing out Burger King’s SEO error. In the end, the media attention may alleviate some of the initial damage done, but the fact remains that had Burger King employed the proper search engine optimization tactics on their micro-advertising site they would have garnered the traffic immediately without enduring any national embarassment.

What did Burger King do wrong? Some may suggest they should have tried to secure the whoppervirgin.com URL and redirect it to their site. The cost to acquire it may have been minimal compared to more common URL names. While META tags are not the main deciding factor in search rank, one look at the site’s description tag reveals that the phrase “Whopper virgin” is not found, so a spider crawl would not detect it.

An intial visit to the site shows a landing page with one large graphic and a prompt to download the right Adobe plug-in. There is no text explaining the purpose of the site. If you don’t have the right plug-in for the site, you have to go elsewhere to find it, but by this time you may have lost interest and have gone somewhere else to satisfy your Web appetite.

This is important to remember, especially if your business is much smaller than one of the fast food industry’s giants. If a company like Burger King cannot be properly found in search due to lack of SEO, what chance does a local business have? Use the tools available on the Internet to assist you in building your site for high search rankings, optimizes for all related keywords, and you just may pass the test.