What is Search Engine Optimization?

Wikipedia has a decent description of this. But for a person who is not familiar with SEO terms, let me explain a few key points. “SEO” is short for search engine optimization. It is also an industry term for describing anyone who specializes in search engine optimization. Search engine optimization includes both on page (on your site) and off page (off your site) efforts.

On page SEO includes meta tags and image descriptions to name a few, but there are many tricks of the trade that go far beyond simple meta tag optimization. If I itemized them all here, what would you need me for?

Off page SEO is a link building process. The SEO professional goes looking to acquire relevant high quality links back to the client’s site. The higher quality those links are, the better “link juice” they give. A high quality site that links back to your site is like an authority “vote” that your site has value. The higher your site’s authority is – indicated by high quality back links – the better your site will rank on the search engines. Being on page one of the search engine is key. If you are not on page one, you aren’t being seen by the vast majority of site viewers looking for keywords about your site’s content.

Proper and effective search engine optimization depends greatly on market research and relevant keywords that convert site visitors to actual sales. You can’t effectively optimize a website or work on off page SEO without knowing the client’s market and competition in that market. Keyword discovery is part of the process and finding which keywords convert to sales is very important to the success of your site and business.

Your geographical location can also greatly effect keywords and SEO techniques. For example, if your business is local only and you only ship or cater to a specific area, your site’s keywords would be more specific to your city, state/province or country.

So as you can see, search engine optimization is not something lightly taken or acted upon. You can spend thousands of dollars on a spiffy new site design and hundreds more a month on SEO, but it could all be completely ineffectual if your market research and keywords don’t convert your visitors to sales.

If you are looking to have your site optimized, I can provide you with a FREE quote. Just send me an email via the contact page.