What is SEO?
The Internet is a vast landscape of code, content and images that are combined to create web pages and, in turn, web sites. Business and individuals use websites for a variety of reasons. Whether it is for personal or business use, however, the main purpose of a website is to get your content into the public eye and coerce them one way or another.
To help organize websites and get the best information to the public search engines have developed algorithms, or formulas, which allow them to look through the content of websites and determine which information is the most relevant for the searches people are performing. Looking at a number of factors, including the content on the page, inbound links and meta information used in the head section of the document which can not be seen on the page.
In order to get better rankings – ideally the front page – in the search engines, many websites utilize SEO, or search engine optimization, to increase their standings with major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
So...What is SEO?
A summarized definition of SEO would probably say that it is the process of improving not only the volume, but also the quality, of search engine traffic to a web site using organic, or natural search results.
What this definition doesn’t tell you is that there is an art and science to the practice of search engine optimization and the SEO specialist must employ a variety of techniques – hopefully white hat (read ethical) techniques to help their clients increase the visibility of their websites. While an explanation of every possible technique employed by an SEO is beyond the scope of this text, website optimization can be boiled down to two main areas:
On Page Optimization – This is where search engine optimization begins (after an evaluation, of course) and includes any work that can be done on the website itself. This includes the addition of keyword optimized content, landing page optimization for e-commerce websites, meta tag optimization, header tag use, internal linking and image optimization. Once your website has been optimized on page, the SEO will then move on to the next step...
Off Page Optimization – Off page optimization primarily involves the link building strategy for the website. Inbound links are looked at by the search engines as a vote of confidence for the website. The more quality, relevant inbound links has, the better chance the website has of ranking well. Not all links are equal, however, and the search engines give a lot more weight to one-way links from respected websites. Basically, the higher the PageRank (for Google) of the website that is linking to you, the more the vote counts.
Unfortunately, the desire for high positions in the search engines has led many websites, and unscrupulous SEOs, to utilize black hat (read unethical) techniques, such as web page cloaking, keyword stuffing and the buying of links to achieve quick gains in the search results. These achievements are always short-lived, however, and can get you blacklisted in the most extreme cases.
If you are looking to gain lasting visibility for your website SEO Specialties will provide the knowledge and experience you need to help you rank for your targeted keywords and improve the quality of your website visitors. We provide SEO Consulting, Content Creation and Content Marketing services utilizing SEO best practices to gain lasting results. Contact us today by telephone at 225.678.6782 or email for a free consultation.