South African Consultant Gets Recognised by World’s Largest Internet Consulting Firm for Excellence

Internet Consultant Francois Muscat produces outstanding search engine optimisation results for his customer and wins a 2007 WSI Excellence Award.

October, 2007 – Midrand, Gauteng, South Africa. 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. Francois 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 website 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.

Francois 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 Francois the WSI Excellence Award for “Excellence in SEO.”

He was up against more than 1500 Internet consultants in 87 countries, who between them produced 30 000 websites this year. Francois 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 Francois has been recognised by WSI. In 2006 he was given an award for “Best Product Showcase” for Food 4 Africa (www.food4africa.org.za).

Francois Muscat says, “This shows that South African’s 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 Höll – e-Commerce Development Manager of Internet Solution says, “We engaged the WSI services when migrating our Corporate websites 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 i.t.o new portals. We are very pleased with the rankings the websites are obtaining and will strive to continue in this manner.