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SEO - What is it? PDF Print E-mail

What is SEO and Should I Care?

SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization, is the active process of tweaking your website, or optimizing your pages to achieve high search engine rankings. Optimizing a website for search engines may require looking to so many various elements and not just a website's content because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site. SEO is also a practice to increase traffic to your site received from search engines and offer your visitors, or customers, good content (search engine worthy content) or service that will make you visitors want to stay on your site and wanting to come back, often, once they have left your site.

Does my company need SEO?

The majority of web traffic to a website, whether a personal or business website, is driven by the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask Jeeves. If you do not optimize your site for search engines by offering them with good content (good food for spiders or crawlers), your site will not be indexed properly, which will result in low search engine rankings and miss out on bringing potential customers to your site. Whether you provide content, services, products for sale or just information, search engines should be very important to you because they are the primary means for internet users to locate what they are looking for.  Search engine traffic can actualy make or break a company's success, so our answer to 'Does my company need SEO?' question is a 'YES".

White Hat versus Black Hat SEO

There are two broad categories SEO Techniques - Techniques that search engines recommend as part of a good design, and those of which search engines do not approve of. SEO industries that use search engines approved techniques fall under the White Hat SEO, which tend to produce results that are long lasting, whereas SEO industries that use unethical SEO means (Black Hat SEO) of getting their client's website ranked pretty good with search engines, will realize that their high search engine rankings will be short lived.  Please also note that Unthetical SEO practice might also get your website banned.

Do I have to pay for SEO?

No you don't have to pay for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)- If you understand how search engines work and have a pretty good guess of what people might type in the search box when searching for a product that you sell, you don't have to pay a penny. Note that SEOis an ongoing process of optimizing your website that actualy has a start date but does not have an end date - meaning, once you start working on your website's SEM marketing, you will never stop. If SEO is  done correctly, your site can appear on the line of the first page search result page and without paying a penny to Google, Yahoo, Bing and others. If you do not understand about SEO and how search engines works, it is recommended to have someone else handle SEO or SEM (Search Engine Marketing) for you.

Will I ever finish marketing for SEO?

Truthfully, you will never stop working on optimizing your website for search engine. Search Engines get better and better and they keep making constant changes to their and use new technology, therefore, we have to continue working with them and make changes to our site to match their new indexing algorithm.  Search engines want to present their customers with good and valued information meeting their search criteria, so when they changes and employ new technology, we changes our strategies while keeping them ethical.

How to implement SEO?

The first thing you need to do to work on your website SEO is learn about each search engine, such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc... Instead of just picking one major search engine and start optimizing your website just for your search engine of choice, search as Google, you will have to consider the others for the use their own indexing technology that differ from the others. Once you learn about each search engine, you have to find a happy medium because you just can't optimize for Google only and forget about the others (Bing or Yahoo) - especially when Bing is actualy getting a lot of attention these days.