Version-X Design

An Introduction to SEO

10/24/2008   11:20 AM   Author: Chris   Tags: Web

A great many people and businesses are familiar with the concept of being able to increase traffic to their website and improving their status and rank in regards to search engine results. Most people, however, are unaware of how this is achieved and what it entails. The purpose of this brief article is to provide a more clear understanding of what this very important but oftentimes overlooked aspect of marketing your business is all about.

A SUCCESSFUL WEBSITE

There are two key aspects to a successful web presence. The first part is the design and development of a compelling and easy to use website that achieves your business objectives. But just putting a great website out there on the internet is not enough. You need people, the right people, actually visiting your website for it to be a success. The web is no Field of Dreams, just because you build it does not mean they will come. Getting visitors to show up is what the second aspect, SEO, is all about.

WHAT IS AN SEO CAMPAIGN?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and an SEO Campaign is an orchestrated effort to improve your website’s standings in a person’s search for terms relevant to your business. Essentially the goal in layman’s terms is to come up as close to the top of the list as possible in the results of a search performed by someone (on Goggle, Yahoo! etc.) who is looking for something that has to do with your company and its products or services. There are a variety of ways to do this, some legitimate, others less so. We will focus on the legitimate ones since they will provide the most relevant visitors and long term benefits and results.

SEO PART ONE: OPTIMIZE YOUR SITE

An SEO Campaign has two parts to it. Part One has to do with what you can do within the confines of your own website to improve your ranking for important keywords. One major aspect of this is the actual development of your website from a programming standpoint to ensure that the site has been built in a way that is maximizing its ability to be “crawled” by the major search engines. Google et al. have programs called bots that scour the internet documenting the content of any website it can find. The keywords that the search engine associates with your site and how relevant they are is heavily based on the information these bots find when they crawl through your web pages. In order to not only be seen by these bots but to also be associated with the keywords that are most important to your company your website needs to be constructed in a particular way and avoid certain pitfalls that will diminish your ranking or possibly even make you essentially invisible to our little bot friends. Other things that can be done within your own site to improve your ranking involve injecting the keywords you want to be associated with into your content and adding additional compelling content of this nature that will get attention from others.

SEO PART TWO: WEB MARKETING

So Part One has to do with your website and optimizing it for crawlability. Part Two is basically all of the things you can do out there on the net that are beyond the confines of your site. This is commonly referred to as web marketing since it is geared towards getting the word out there about your company to other sites in a way that associates your company name and website address with your important keywords. Things such as getting press releases posted on various sites and getting interest from other websites who then link to your site from theirs are both ways of essentially expanding your company’s presence on the web as a whole. The more places you’re mentioned in conjunction with your targeted keywords the more the search engines consider you important and relevant to those keywords.

SUMMING IT UP

This particular article’s purpose was to give a broad, SEO for Dummies kind of description of what search engine optimization is all about. Obviously there are many different steps and procedures that need to be done to achieve a successful SEO campaign, most of them requiring a strong understanding of best practices, what the search engines are looking for/punish you for, and a knack for analyzing a company, the keyword research data and making an educated selection of the appropriate, optimal keywords. You should now be ready to move onto and digest the more specific details at this point. A more robust breakdown of what’s involved and all of the requisite confusing techno-jargon that comes along with it is available on our SEO Services page.