80% or more of visitors to most sites begin with a search engine.
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is the art and science of making sure a website does well in the unpaid, organic listings of the search engines.
SEO is about advising on and improving such things as how to:
- avoid problems with architecture, accessibility, usability
- find relevant links on and to the site
- have a good quality Web site that will appeal to your target market(s)
- keep within the terms of search engines and directories to which that site is submitted
- write copy that works for target markets and the search engines
Google is the best known and most successful search engine and it gives advice here on what you should look for and avoid in SEO and companies offering SEO.
SEO is not "rocket science" but it is time-consuming and the main search engines all use different methods to compile their results pages and never publish their criteria which change from time to time. That means that the search engines need to be monitored for those changes which also takes time and effort.
Any SEO strategy should be there to achieve the desired results in an ethical way. This takes time and requires keyword analysis for you and your competitors and understanding the desires and behaviour of your customers and potential customers so that they can find you easily.
This means understanding on the key words and phrases they use to sarch for your particular products or services. If those keywords / phrases are not being searched for by your customers you may get irrelevant rankings with no traffic or sales from them. In addition some keywords / phrases are so popular that getting to the top is virtually impossible. For example Google produced the following results, when this was being written, for the number of pages it has indexed for:
Getting to the top of these would require a lot of effort and investment.
Really effective SEO is about discovering relevant niches as well as 'the long tail' of obscure keywords and phrases that will bring business. It is an ongoing process and a flow of optimised content and hyperlinks is needed each month to maintain and improve results.
