What is SEO?

ROLCAM · Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2007 11:18 am Post subject: What is SEO?

What is SEO?

by Jared Blake

Many people ask me, what exactly is SEO? SEO is the abbreviation for search engine optimization. SEO consists of many techniques, that you apply to your website to help influence the search engines to not only rank your site with a higher ranking, but more importantly to rank the keywords you have carefully chosen that are relevant to your site, to list higher in the search engine listings. The bottom line here is to drive more visitors or traffic to your website, in order to increase your potential long-term customer base and profits. It will not be enough to build a website, and submit it to the search engines, then sit back and wait in hope that visitors will come. Trust me from experience, nobody will come. Building a website is just one of the many jobs you will encounter in working towards a successful and profitable internet business.

If an internet visitor is searching for Nike golf shoes and your website sells Nike golf shoes, you would want your website's listing to appear somewhere around the first two pages of listings on the major search engines. Currently on Google there are 1,960,000 listings for Nike golf shoes. Studies show, that most web searchers rarely look beyond the first or second page of listings. Therefore, it is critical your site listing is somewhere on the first few pages of the search engines, Otherwise, your site's listing will become a lost speck of dust in the vast internet highway.

You must find ways to drive customers to your site, if you are going to have any chance in making profits from your internet business. SEO (search engine optimization) is the sum of techniques you apply to your website in order to make this happen. Many factors are involved in SEO. You must do well in all SEO factors, in order to get the highest possible rankings for your website listings.

Currently the three major search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Google is currently considered the "Big Daddy" of the search engines, with millions of searches conducted daily. Google also provides primary and secondary search results for many of the other internet search engines. It would be very beneficial if your website were to rank high on the Google search engine.

In SEO, we are concerned with the natural or organic search results provided by the search engines at no cost to the website owner. This is different from a pay per click campaign that involves bidding and paying for website traffic. Website owners may want to utilize pay per click campaigns along with organic results, or until the organic SEO techniques are providing you with the desired level of traffic. Of course all this will depend on the budget you have allocated towards website promotion.

Here is an incomplete list, a non-comprehensive list of some of the basic factors involved in SEO: onpage optimization which includes, keyword targeting, writing search engine friendly code, title tag and description meta tag, keyword placement, keyword density, relevant content, H1 and H2 header tags. Offpage optimization which includes, link popularity, reciprocal or back links, inbound or one-way links, anchor text with keywords. Other factors to consider are articles, blogs, podcasts, understanding and using robots.txt, submitting your site to the key search engines, converting your visitors into buyers, and many more factors are involved in SEO.

Hopefully this quick overview will provide you with a better understanding of "What is SEO."
_________________
Roland Camilleri

Moderator

Sydney , Australia.