Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization, a.k.a. “On-page SEO”, is the art of coding your web site in such a way that makes it easy for the major search engines, like Google, Yahoo, and many more, to find your web site and classify its contents.
Enabling people to find you on the Internet by name and having search engines place you on the first page of their result lists is usually as simple as having web site with a domain name (www.yourname.com) that reflects your company name and on-page SEO.
On the other hand, enabling people to find you by searching for your products and services and having search engines place you on the first page of their result lists requires much more work than simply having well coded web site. Why? Simply put, because you are not the only one providing your products and services.
In this case, search engines must somehow choose which site to list first. Each search engines has its own frequently changed long lists of criteria to do this. Some of these criteria are more important to them than others. For most of them though, relevancy and and the number of links your site has on other reputable web sites, usually referred to as “back-links”, are among the top criteria. Relevancy refers to how related they think your web site is as compared to what is being searched. This means that the content of your site must show a match with what being searched. Thus the better content it has, the higher your site “ranks” on the search result lists. Having more of and better back-links implies and requires popularity and importance, and hence, a lot more work than simply having a web site made.
The art of making popularity and relevancy happen is still commonly, but poorly,
referred to as simply SEO, while it is more accurately referred to as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or “Off-page SEO”. “Off-page” because these activities have nothing to do with the coding of your web pages.
This art involves:
• Promoting and advertising of your site (Google Adwords and paid advertising on other web directories)
• Logging your site and business data on the numerous web directories. Many are free.
• Create blogs (right on your site using Google’s Blogger, and the popular Wordpress).
• Create micro-blogs (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others).
• Create and maintain regular newsletters to clients that contain links to information that resides on your web site.
• Create a bunch of similar sites that link to your site. There are companies specializing in creating multiple sites for you.. However, Google does not like this practice and can tell the difference between a real site and sites created just for this purpose.
• Many other techniques to manipulate the various search engines ever changing criteria. One such activities is, as hinted above, to write or rewrite the content of your site to match the some of most searched terms people used, frequently referred to as “keywords”. See Google Adwords for help with choosing keywords.
These activities require major efforts and therefore expense. That is why full service search engine marketing companies often charge from hundreds to thousands of dollars per month to do this for a company. It’s good to know the difference between these and others who also call themselves SEO companies who simply register you on their or a bunch of web directories. These later do not charge you much and their services are legitimate except they do not provide the full spectrum of SEM activities.