DISCOVER SEO - WHAT IS SEO? ( SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION )

SEO is a continuous process of monitoring and improving a web site's performance in Search Engine page rankings. It is also about advising the client about the quality of a sites current traffic amongst other activities, through a long term approach methodical rankings improvements on a vast number of search terms.

The aim of optimization is to find the best possible way to bring in organic search traffic from relevant search terms which portential customers may use to drive traffic to that site. This must be done without comprimising the businesses key message to his visitors, but still ensuring that the site is easy to find when a key term is searched for. Hence the importance of top organic listings on the serach engines.

An Analogy: A web site is just like owning your very own island during the Age of Discovery. If your Island was not actually listed on the world map - in this case the World Wide Web - then you may find that you receive few or no visitors! Visitors are customers, its that simple.

SEO work needs to be done both on the page element you see and on the many elements (mostly code) which you do not see in order for your business' web site to rank well. The internet is quite possibly the world's most competitive market place today.

Both human and search engine 'bots' must equally be able to read, navigate and understand your offering / product or they will not return to your web site again. No returning traffic means no sales – no 'bots' means no traffic in the first place. You need both, no one is mutually exclusive of the other!

Times Have Changed - Peoples Experiences Now Affect The Way They Search On The Web: Just four short years ago if someone was looking for something online, they would trawl though the top 50 or even 100 listings, that the first 10 pages! Not any more ... Surfers rarely move passed the first 20 listing before they change their search to improve the results they see. This is terrible news for business on the web. If people are not looking past the second page before they try another search, how can you make sales? SEO is about identifying search terms which a businesses clientele would be using and then working hard to beat the competition to the top spots. The costs are high and the rewards even higher for those who are successful, but for the vast majority of business owners, the result is failure when competing online. This failure results in disillusion, and quite rightly so.  

There are those that say that SEO is a fictitious idea: ask them if they really believe that no expert help is needed by thousands of business to get the very same 10 positions on Google, Yahoo and MSN’s coveted Page One. The fact is that there are only 10 places on page one and last we looked, several thousand and in most cases millions of competing pages!

Does SEO actually exist? – I take a quote from Google :

"Many SEO's and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for web site owners, from writing copy to giving advice on site architecture and helping to find relevant directories to which a site can be submitted.” – I Guess so.