Francois Muscat, a certified Internet consultant with WSI, the world's largest Internet consulting firm, has been honoured at the first annual WSI Excellence Awards at WSI's Excellence and Innovation Conference in Orlando, Florida.
Muscat was responsible for producing outstanding search engine optimisation (SEO) results for his customer, Internet Solutions, South Africa's leading Internet service provider, making him the winner in the category of "Excellence in SEO".
SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a Web site from search engines through "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Usually, the higher a site is ranked in the search results, the more traffic that site will receive. This is not an easy task and certainly requires the expertise of a professional Internet marketer.
Muscat optimised the site for the keywords "Internet Solutions", an extremely competitive term. On August 24, 2007, he was able to get www.is.co.za to rank first in Google, with 536 million competitors and third in Yahoo, with 230 million competitors. This impressive accomplishment earned Muscat the WSI Excellence Award for "Excellence in SEO".
He was up against more than 1 500 Internet consultants in 87 countries, who, between them, produced 30 000 Web sites this year. Muscat was also nominated for two other awards - "Best Industry Application" and "Excellence in making a difference in the life of your customers".
This is not the first time Muscat has been recognised by WSI. In 2006 he was given an award for "Best Product Showcase" for Food 4 Africa (www.food4africa.org.za).
Muscat says: "This shows that South Africans can compete in almost any area on the global stage and win."
WSI introduced its first annual Excellence Awards this month as a way to recognise excellence among its franchisees in providing leading-edge Internet solutions in their local markets around the world. WSI received several case study submissions by consultants to be considered for the 2007 WSI Excellence Awards. Each case study was scored and ranked by a team of WSI submission auditors, who all voted to determine the winners.
Elize H"oll - e-Commerce Development Manager of Internet Solutions, says: "We engaged the WSI services when migrating our corporate Web sites to a content management platform and it was key that we apply a suitable search engine optimisation strategy. Francois was informative, professional and guided us throughout the process and is still providing advisory services on an ongoing basis in terms of new portals. We are very pleased with the rankings the Web sites are obtaining and will strive to continue in this manner."
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