“Search Engine Optimization”

What is SEO? Well, this blog is made to answer that question and help you understand a little bit of the basic elements of SEO.

Wikipedia said that Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

Personally, I believe that SEO is merging with the internet marketing and online marketing practices to where they are almost one and the same. This implies that SEO is about getting top search engine positions naturally, but goes further to include branding and marketing your site.

To me SEO is more about traffic generation and visitor conversion. To get top results, you have to garner huge number of back links, which is an internet marketing technique. But in the end of the day it doesn’t matter what you call it, as long as you have more visitors, increase brand awareness, and your customers help promote you.

So does your business need SEO? Well, yes, yes and yes. But say that only if you want to stay in business. It used to be that being online was optional and considered an extension of your business. Now your online presence is a part of your business and must be marketed.

A lot of people think that once they got their website up its set and done, and they don’t need to do anything more with it. Well, that’s not true. If you put it out there and you don’t market it and promote it, nobody’s going to find it. So, you really do need a large time and budget to market your online presence. Just because it’s there, it doesn’t mean that people are just going to find it; unless you give them directions.

Your only options are to hire an SEO consultant, do it yourself, or go out of business.

So if you were to do it yourself, what would you be trying to do?

There are two types of techniques you can focus on: on page and off page. Your on page is the ones that you have most control of. Those are the HTML and coding type things; like your Meta Tags, Heading Tags, Robots.txt, NoFollow Tags, Title Tags, and Alt Tags. There’s also the content and layout, which is how you write it and what you write; making sure that your human visitors understand it and find it valuable. It’s really great that you want to write things for the search engines; but the truth is that search engine don’t have money and they don’t buy you products, but human visitors do. So ultimately, your content needs to be address to these people.

The other half are the off page techniques; your back links. So who’s writing about you? Who’s linking to you? Search engine really likes if you are writing stuff that is so valuable, thus other people are linking to it. That means search engines are going to find you valuable, and it also means that your human visitors are going to find you valuable too when they land on your page! So they’re more likely to buy stuff from you.

Article exchanges, link exchanges, and social networking such as face book: these are community that you can actually build relationships with people, where they are receptive to the idea that you are promoting yourself by helping them. There’s definitely right ways and wrong ways of using social networking sites, but it’s definitely something that you need to be using. I do not recommend using too many of them, because it’s hard to focus on too many communities all at once. Some people say they only use one or two, others say eight or ten. You have to find what’s right for you.

Press releases are great way to get news and worthy items about your site.

Social book marking sites like Digg, Stumble, etc.: these are great places where you can bookmark all your favorite places. So if you bookmark your own sites that link to your articles, you gain search engine recognition.

Paid advertising and Pay per click is not traditionally SEO; but as I have said, that marketing and SEO are merging. Thus, paid advertising is definitely part of this plan of gaining traffic to you site.

Video blogging and Podcasting are great ways to allow people to hear your content. Blogging is not just written articles. People don’t like reading all the time. They like to listen to things, take it in the car with them, watch movies, and watch news casts.

Link bait is a term that’s use to attract people to your site; free giveaways, contests, and anything that is honest to goodness value, something that can promote your site in other places to attract people.

I hope I have enlightened you that SEO is important for your site; that you need to either hire SEO consultant or you need to learn to do SEO on your own.

I hope you find this article valuable. Good luck and take care.