If you’re looking to have a new website built, here’s a checklist of all the things you should consider, to make sure it’s well optimized for search engines:

The event is New Media in the New Year and Eric will be one of four panelists discussing SEO, Web Design, Web Development, and Social Media.

The event’s headline reads: “Searching for that perfect tool to make your business’s engine roar, but not sure if you should redesign your website, get linked into social media, or find another way to keep your company’s face in the game?”

We see this all the time, most often when we’re on the phone with a client who is not here in Batimore, where our SEO company is located. We’ve been talking with clients in Chicago or Lauderdale, for example and ask them to do a search to show off the results of our SEO work, only to hear them say, “that’s not what I see…”

We often find ourselves having to explain that search engines base their results of course on relevancy, but also on hundreds of other small factors like browser type, searcher’s location or search history, website language or page rank. The list goes on. Here are the three factors we’ve noticed to be the most important.

First the search engines update their rankings throughout the day. Learn more about how Google indexes the web.

Second, if you’re logged in to Google, Bing, or Yahoo, your personal search history and profile information is being used to serve up more targeted results. I’ve seen this referred to as “search personalization.” Read these links for more information:

• Search Engine Land article on Search Personalization
• Techcrunch article on Search Personalization

Third, if you are searching from one location, and someone else from another location, you may be hitting different datacenters. Rankings can vary from one datacenter to the next.

• Here’s a tool that will show you results for the same search performed in different datacenters.