Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The Web Income Journal's Guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Building a successful online business requires driving the right type of traffic to your business website. The “right type of traffic” here simply means, targeted traffic – that is, people who are actually looking for what you are offering or those who are more likely to buy your products or services.

Of course, there are different ways you can get traffic to your business site or blog. One of such is through search engine optimization (SEO).

What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Instead of attempting to define the term “search engine optimization” let's simply see what Wikipedia has to say about it:

“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content, HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.

The plural of the abbreviation SEO can also refer to “search engine optimizers”, those who provide SEO services.”

If that seems too verbose, then let's see if Webopedia.com can help:

“Search engine optimization is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (SERP) — including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.

SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.”

From the above, search engine optimization is simply an internet marketing strategy that is used in driving traffic to your sites from the search engines. This sound simple indeed. However, where many find SEO intimidating is in implementing the different strategies.

In this guide you'll find links to different posts on this blog that give you insight into how you can effectively implement the various strategies.

Is SEO Actually Free?

One other thing that can be seen from the definition above is that SEO is free (Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search results). But as much as this may seem to be the case, the truth however is that, when you consider the time invested in doing SEO (and time is money) that may not really be the case.

Besides, there are also occasions where you may need to employ the services of SEOs to help you with optimizing your sites. In this sense, SEO is also not really free.

But not minding the above, compared to other forms of traffic generation, like PPC, SEO is free because once you have invested the initial time and money (in engaging the services of SEOs) you can continue to drive traffic to your sites, some times for years, without any further investment.

Why Do You Need A Guide Like This One?

Considering the importance of SEO in traffic generation, having a basic knowledge of what it takes is really necessary. Whether you want to do this yourself or you want to hire professional SEOs this knowledge will help you have an inkling of what is being done.

For example, with the many updates introduced by Google in the recent past, many businesses are now spending more money to clean up the mess that professional SEOs have caused them. If these business owners had this basic knowledge they would have known from the beginning that these SEOs were actually employing “blackhat” tactics and they would have saved themselves the time and resources spent on correcting the mess.

And so, I invite you to carefully check out these posts. You will be glad you did. For recent entries check out our SEO channel here.

1. Getting Started:

Is SEO A Dead Web Marketing Strategy?

2. Setting Up an SEO Optimized Site:

3. SEO Keyword Research:

4. SEO Content Creation Tips:

5. SEO Backlinks:

6. SEO and Google Algorithm Updates:

7. SEO Extras:

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