Search engine optimization is the only way your agency's Web site is going to be found, by consumers in a market with 80 million .com names, the ubiquitous generic in Web world.

Search engines want to find the appropriate sites to present in their results, and to make sure your agency's site is found, it has to be visible to the search engine. To optimize results for your agency's Web site, the architecture of the site has to be correct and backlinks, or links pointing to the agency's Web site, are also critical to SEO.

"Content is most important," said the director. "Is it relevant to what people are looking for? Search engines want relevant results." He explained that the domain name is a critical element of your site's content and search engine optimization, because search engines tokenize Web site names - that is, they break them down into smaller parts - and the domain, such as .travel, appears as a word to the search engine.

So having a .travel domain name improves the SEO for an agency's Web site, especially among consumers searching for travel topics.There are billions of travel searches annually and travel search is the largest search category, even surpassing adult sites.

"Travel is the biggest industry in the world. It should have its own Web domain and the biggest players in the industry have realized it," the director said. "Big travel marketers know about SEO and thus use .travel as their domain name. We tell people to point their dot-com names to their .travel domain names because .travel does better in the search engines."