What is SEO?

Search engine optimiation is a process that can make a web site rank high in the organic searches of the engines. There are whitehat tricks and blackhat tricks,and black hat will get your site banned. There are expensive seo pros, cheap seo pros and rip-off seo companies and knwoing which is best takes time to investigate

But you want people to find your website? First page placement can be as simple as investing a few dollars into paid search advertising. Within minutes your advertisement can be listed at the top of the pack among other PPC listings. When it is this easy to push your site to the top why would anyone bother with traditional SEO?

Paid advertising may be a quick and easy way to get your site to the top, but for many industries it can also be incredibly expensive over the long term. After factoring in the click costs, it is still possible to make a decent profit however if the visitors were to find you in the organic listings, the profit would be much higher.

The search engine optimization industry as a whole is still very young. New firms are springing up all over the place, and many design houses seem to think they have the skills and knowledge it takes to provide these services. While some are good at what they do, they are no substitute for the real thing. It is important to work with an SEO company that is established and well recognized in their industry.

At the front end, having a professional optimize your site may seem like an expensive undertaking, but when compared to the ongoing expense of PPC, SEO is much more affordable in the long run. Typically SEO campaigns start off with a one time fee, and may lead to monthly maintenance to keep your site ranking - in most cases this is much less expensive than the paid alternative.

A properly optimized site achieving top rankings on their own will almost always outperform in terms of conversions when compared to those competing sites placed with AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture), or other PPC services. Typically 80% of searchers will click on the organic listings as apposed to the paid!

While PPC can bring you increased profile and (hopefully) additional profits, one of the biggest downfalls is that when you stop paying, the rankings and traffic are gone. If you take on a professional SEO for a one time website optimization and in the event that your rankings slip for your target phrase, you may retain a number of secondary keyword rankings, and your traffic will not entirely disappear. Remember that in most cases, the initial rankings can be maintained through the use of a monthly maintenance program.

While hands-on SEO is often the best solution to achieve top rankings for the do-it-yourself webmaster, chances are tapping into the brains of a professional SEO through a consulting service can give them the edge they need to compete while reducing costs considerably.

There is no substitute to a properly optimized website when it comes to performance and overall conversions. Sites ranking in the natural listings tend to convert at a higher rate and draw higher numbers of targeted traffic. As the Internet continues to increase in popularity, it will only become more and more difficult to be found, which places more weight on optimization. For anyone thinking of placing their business online, they should strongly consider hiring the services of a professional SEO to get things off to a positive start.

Every web site needs to have certain design aspects in order to achieve the full effects of an SEO campaign. Below area few points to take into consideration when building or updating your web site.

1. Size Matters. The size of a web site can have a huge impacton search engine rankings. Search engines love content, so if you have only a few pages to your site and your competitors have dozens, itâ€™s difficult to see a top page ranking for your site. In some cases it may be difficult to present several pages of information about your business or products, so you may need to think about adding free resources for visitors. It will help in broadening the scope of your web site (which search engines like) as well as keep visitors on your site longer, possibly resulting in more sales.

2. Graphics-Based Web Sites. While web sites that offer the visitor a more esthetically-pleasing experience may seem likethe best choice for someone searching for your product, they are the most difficult to optimize. Since search engine robotscannot read text within graphics or animation, what they see may be just a small amount of text. And if we learned anything from point #1, small amounts of content will not result in top rankings. If you really must offer the visitor a graphics-heavy or Flash web site, consider creating an html-based side of your site that is also available to visitors. This site will be much easier to promote on the search engines and your new found visitors will also have the option to jump over to the nicer looking part of your site.

3. Dynamic Web Pages. If most of your web site is generated by a large database (such as a large book dealer with stock that is changing by the minute) you may find that some of your pages do not get indexed by major search engines. If you look at the URL of these pages they can be extremely long and have characters such as ?, #, &, %, or = along with huge amounts of seemingly random numbers or letters. Since these pages are automatically generated by the database as needed, the search engines have a tough time keeping them up to date and relevant for search engine users.

One way to combat this problem is to offer a search engine friendly site map listing all your static pages just to let themknow that you do have permanent content on your site. If search engines see links going to and from these dynamic pages within a good internal linking system, this may also lead to the pagesgetting indexed. The link popularity of your site may carry more weight in this case as well, so if you canâ€™t offer as much static content as your competition, make sure you have an aggressive link campaign on the go.

4. Proper Use of HTML. There is quite a bit of sub-par web design software out there. Word processors usually have a wayto create HTML documents which can be easily uploaded to a site via ftp. However, in many cases the code that the search engine robots see is mostly lines and lines of font and position formatting, not relevant content. The more efficiently written web sites usually achieve higher rankings. Our choice for web design software is Macromedia Dreamweaver, as it is an industry standard. It also makes using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) a breeze, which can drastically cut down on the amount of text formatting in HTML code. Hand-coding HTML to design sites isalso a good method if you are proficient enough.

There are some no brainers too: Web sites with abnormal amounts of hyperlinks, bold or italicized text, improper use of heading, alt, or comment tags can also expect to see low rankings.

5. Using Frames. Donâ€™t use frames. Frames are a thing of the 90â€™s (and in the Internet world that is eons ago) and are noteven supported by some search engines. The search engines that are able to index your site through frames will most likelyfrown upon them. Whatever you are trying to accomplish by using frames can usually be done with the help of PHP includesor CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Some browsers are not frames-compatible, so there is the danger of some visitors notbeing able to see your site at all. Book marking of individual pages within a frame becomes difficult without lengthy scriptsbeing written.

7. Update Your Information. Not only does information printed two or three years ago reflect badly on your organization when it is read by a visitor, it is also looked down upon by search engines. Web sites that continuously update and grow their web sites usually experience higher rankings than stagnant sites. When the trick to SEO is offering visitors the most relevant information, you can bet that the age of web pages is taken into consideration by search engines. Consider creating a section of your site devoted to news within your organization, or have a constantly updated resources area.

8. Using Automated Web Site Templates: Sure, they are easy for you to add information and you need not know web design, but these site build web sites restrict you from making your site fully search engine ready. If you are serious about getting your web site found, learn web design or hire a web designer. You can then have full control over your web site. Site build sites, or using a control panel to manage your site is an easy short cut, but in the long run, not an easy way to get rankings.