Search Engine Optimization

If your business has any online elements (such as a website), then Search Engine Optimization is crucial to your continued success of your business. You may have the most expensive web site in your industry, however without internet traffic (visitors) to your web site, it's basically useless. It is not only traffic that you want as well as targeted traffic. A good quality SEO service will offer relevant, consistent web traffic to your website(s).

SEO are specialized techniques used to optimize your web site, to be Search engine friendly and increase your chances of placing well in searches. The main elements of on-page SEO are optimisation of the title tag, the headline tag, the body text, and the Meta tags. As a matter of fact, sites with excellent Search Engine Optimization are making giant leaps in rankings and getting a major boost in free traffic with Google's new update.

2 types of SEO

SEO can be broken down into two categories. These are on-page and off-page optimization. Each type is what it sounds like. On-page SEO is what you actually put on your website. It refers to the things you, as a webmaster, can do to your site, in order to make sure the search engines know what keywords are relevant to the site. This can include having the proper meta-tag descriptions, headers, and page titles. These are all things that Google look for when ranking websites.

Off page SEO

Off-page optimization is the things you can do that will help you rank better but occur off your website and on the internet. Off-page SEO includes pro-active link building, article writing, building web 2.0 properties and social bookmarking. Off-page SEO is the process where you get other sites to promote your site by linking to it. Each time you get a link, it's like getting a vote for your website. The more votes you get, the higher you climb the search engine results. And the more relevant your links are to the keyword phrase, the more that link will do for your rankings. The more people that "like" your website the more search engines "like" it and therefore it will rank higher. This can all seem very confusing but is actually quite simple, especially when you deal with professional SEO's.

On Page SEO

The first thing to know before any on-page or off-page work is done is knowing what keywords to target. Keywords are the phrases that people type into Google and other search engines. When they type in theses phrases you want your business to be shown. You can pay Google and the other engines to do this for you put research has shown that people are more likely to click on the organic results (the ones that appear naturally or unpaid).

In summary, if you want to be found on the internet you must be pro-active in promoting your website. When a company undertakes a search engine optimization program, whether it is performed in-house or outsourced to an SEO service, most of the attention is focused on the company website. This is the one facet where there's a sense of control–once a web site is released into the wild, the company will have to see how its site fares against all the other websites out there, whether or not the other sites are using ethical SEO techniques or not.

For more on SEO, Check out our article: Local SEO