Search Engine Optimization (SEO) continues to intimidate marketing professionals. It can be overwhelming, even for industry experts. There are many different strategies and many companies that offer search optimization services, but only a few that really know what they are doing.
Before explaining the basics of SEO, the term Search Engine Marketing (SEM) needs to be addressed.
SEO is part of SEM
SEM is an Internet marketing strategy that focuses on driving traffic from search engines to a respective website. It encompasses a variety of techniques with the same goal: directing as many users as possible from search engines to the website.
SEM tactics like Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, paid search ranking, paid directory inclusion and SEO are all valid techniques to increase traffic to a website. Some are more effective than others, some are simply black-hat practices that should be avoided.
Search Engine Optimization is an SEM strategy that increases the visibility of a given website to the search engines. Its goal is to increase the rank that the website receives from the search engines in the list of search results. It allows the website to display higher in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), so that more users see, and click on the website's link.
SEO link building
The two most common, and most effective SEO strategies are link building and content writing. Other tactics are used as well, the increasingly popular and important social media.
Social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, can provide significant exposure to a website. They are used to spread the word about a product or service, discounts and promotions, company information, promote brand awareness and guide prospective customers through the sales funnel, converting them into buyers.
Link building comes in several different forms, from partner links to article marketing. A website can start a partnership with another website with relevant content and have a link included from the partner site to the website. This is called a back-link, a link from another site into the website.
Article marketing is widely used to create back-links to a website. A few high quality, unique articles with relevant keyword links back to the website are worth more than thousands of low quality links. Black-hat SEO uses practices like article spinning and spamming to create as many back-links as possible. Often times, these articles are duplicates that have been altered slightly. They are hard to read, uninformative, with bad spelling and grammar.
These black-hat articles are placed on low quality article farms, then redistributed by the thousands across the Web. The search engines pick up on these practices and penalize websites employing them, many times resulting in the website getting banned from the search results page.
Keyword links that are placed in unique and high quality articles are encouraged by the search engines. These articles, when placed on highly authoritative, trustworthy sites are very effective in placing a website higher on the list.
Back-links, coming from a relevant, authoritative partner site or other relevant sites are identified by the search engines. The search engines use these back-links to determine whether other websites and Internet users think the website has relevant content. In general, the more quality back-links, the higher a website ranks on the SERP.
SEO content writing
Is is crucial to place fresh, unique and relevant content on the website. The search engines crawl the Internet regularly in search of keywords and fresh content.
Copywriting is the process of duplicating an article, altering it slightly to include the websites keywords. Search engines do not like this technique and their programming has the capability to find these articles and penalize the website.
Instead, a website should contain unique content, relevant to its product or service.
Search engines
Google, being the largest search box on the Internet with 66.1% market share in September, gets the most attention from SEO experts. Its search algorithms change from time to time are not available to the public. However, the SEO industry has gotten a pretty good grasp on its expected behavior and todays SEO practices can be highly effective. A website does not rank overnight with white-hat practices, but it will ensure more long-term results.
Remember: Google and other search engines are constantly battling unnatural search ranking and black-hat SEO practices. A website's rank is, for the most part, based on its authority, trustworthiness and relevance to a user's keyword search. A website cannot obtain all of these in a matter of a few weeks or months.
Work only with a reliable Search Engine Optimization company, like SEO Denver - FatToad Internet Marketing. FatToad believes in a change in the market, offering only ethical white-hat search optimization. FatToad's priority: building long lasting business relationships, maximizing a website's Return On Investment and online presence.