What is SEO?

The web definition is: the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine (webopedia.com). This is a general definition, the truth is, and it is a bit more complicated than that.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization, as it is usually called, is a type of search engine marketing (SEM). It is the art of manipulating a website under certain keywords or phrases to be ranked at the top of the search engine listings pages SERPs). SEO is used by companies to increase the amount of traffic to their website to convert them to sales. It is believed that the higher a website is ranked in the SERPs, the more traffic, for a particular keyword or phrase, it will receive.

SEO can also be referred to as Search Engine Optimizers. These are individuals who use certain techniques to achieve high rankings for their clients. these techniques can be referred to as White Hat or Black Hat tactics. White Hat tactics are techniques that follow the guidelines for search engines, basically the right way of doing Search Engine Optimization. Black Hat, on the other hand, is not. Black Hat tactics can refer to adding lists of keywords on a website, creating gateway or doorway pages full on keywords, or even creating multiple lead generation website with the same content to get listed more than once on the first page. These Black Hat tactics are very, very wrong, and can lead to penalizations from the search engines. such penalties include, de-ranking of a website, which is when a website will not be ranked for any keywords other than its own domain name. Black Hat can also lead to the Banning of a website from the search engine for 5 to 10 years. Not really a good thing.

Search engine optimization is about onsite and offsite manipulation as well. Offsite SEO is when optimizers will gather many links to a website. Links can be considered as votes. The more votes a website has towards a given keyword or phrase, the higher the chances a search engine believes the URL is relevant and increases the rankings.

Search engine optimization is targeted for manipulating a website’s code. Search engines can only see text. The only way they see images, are if they have ALT attributes to them. Search engines will look at the HTML code of a website and compare it to other competing websites for the given keyword or phrase.

Search engines have a very hard time looking at Flash websites. For the most part they can not see them, and providing search engine optimization for them is a difficult task. Adobe is making efforts to solve this problem, but until then Search engine optimizers have to split the flash site to have content be static in between multiple flash files, drive more and more links to the website, or have the companies create a HTML version of the flash website.

Search engine optimization is a very strong type of search engine marketing, along with Pay Per Click, and Banner Ad Campaigns. The only difference is that doing a Pay Per Click or Banner Ad Campaign can be very expensive, and your ads only appear until your budget runs out. With SEO, your website is up in the rankings 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The cost for the service is usually a one time cost. There is no marketing budget to maintain your rankings unless the website is involved in a maintenance agreement for the constant changing algorithms. The bottom line is; it is usually cheaper in the long run to do Search Engine Optimization than any other SEM campaign.