Internet Marketing, Online Sales, eCommerce have become hot topics today in many Sri Lankan business forums as well as in many internal company meetings. Many of such meetings however end up in assigning a website development project to an external party who ultimately come up with a fancy websites along with a huge bill. But the most important questions still remain unanswered – Who should visit the website, how do we attract them, why should they visit us, and what do we want them to do on our website.

Failure to identify the right target audience for a website and inability to understand their online behavior has been the top most reasons for the failure of many websites of Sri Lankan companies. According to Alexa.com which is a popular source of web usage information, Google.lk tops the list of most visited websites by Sri Lankans. If users/customers mainly go on Google to find the information/products/services/ideas, it is obvious that any website built with a purpose of delivering such information and/or selling online should be present on Google (and in other popular search engines such as Yahoo, MSN) when customers search for them.

But it has been a mystery to many business professionals and website operators as to what should exactly be done in order to get their websites appearing on search engines when customers perform keyword searches.  This process of optimizing a web site (web pages) to appear on Search Engine Result Pages for related search terms (keywords) is popularly know as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Even though the information related to SEO guidelines, best practices, procedure are made publicly available by all major search engines and other online sources; a need currently exists for authoritative information source on this subject among the decision makers who are involved in the online/internet marketing. Responding to this market need, One Day Workshop on Search Engine Marketing is being organized by the eBusiness-Academy which will be held on the 27th March 2010 (from 9am to 5pm) at the Excel World, Colombo 10.

This event is organized by www.eBusiness-Academy.org which is the first and only online community website created in Sri Lanka for creating and sharing the knowledge in the fields of eMarketing, eCommerce and eBusinss Management.  The content of the workshop is mainly designed to suit the needs of online marketing professionals, web designers and engineers, and any other professionals who are involved in the decision making related to website marketing.

The workshop will be facilitated by Suranga Priyashantha, who has over 6 years of experience in the field of eCommerce and eMarketing. He currently works as the General Manager (eMarketing) of Roomsnet International Pvt Ltd, which is a global eCommerce company based in Sri Lanka. He is a Certified eMarketer and also holding a B.Sc. special degree in Marketing Management, the Post Graduate Diploma in Marketing offered by CIM (UK) and the Graduate Diploma in IT offered by BCS (UK). He has also participated in some of the world's most recognized eMarketing conferences such as "Search Engine Strategies" held in New York and 'Technology for Marketing and Advertising' in London. More details about the workshop can be obtained from www.eBusiness-Academy.org