What is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, refers to the wide variety of strategies used to make your website more appealing to the search engines in the hopes of drawing free traffic to your site.

Getting free search engine traffic is often called organic traffic, or natural search traffic. You don’t pay for it, and if you have the right mindset, you can continue to get large volumes of natural search traffic for years to come.

Unfortunately, when you first launch a website, you probably won’t have thousands of visitors pounding down your door, eating up your bandwidth, just to get a look at your content. When it comes to getting visitors to your website, you’ve got a few choices – two main ones include either paying for your traffic through pay-per-click advertising programs like Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing, or waiting around for free, organic traffic to find you through the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will help place your site higher in the natural search engine rankings. By natural, we mean free, as opposed to pay-per-click advertising. So by optimizing your site for the search engines, you will receive free traffic.

SEO revolves around two major processes; on-site optimization and off-site optimization. On-site includes anything that you control on your site. So title tags, content, linking structure within your site and all other factors on your pages. Off-site is everything else. This means all the links to your site from other sites on the Internet. In theory, you can't control off-site factors.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines


Professional SEO Services from an SEO Expert

Whether you have a new website and are looking increase traffic or have a established website that is not attracting enough web traffic, my SEO service plans can help you reach your goals

* Website assessment
* Keyword research and analysis
* Competition analysis
* Website structure and coding assessment
* SEO strategy formulation
* Meta data analysis and rewriting
* Link building strategies development and implementation
* Monitoring rankings and creating status reports

Here are some of the basic benefits of SEO:

* SEO results in increased targeted traffic to your website
* SEO helps create brand identity
* SEO creates better search engine positioning
* SEO helps you gain comp0etitive advantage
* SEO results in fast measurable ROI
* SEO boosts product sales and online visibility
* SEO brings in free targeted traffic and hence results in low client acquisition costs
* SEO can allow you to compete efficiently and effectively against larger competitors
* SEO provides continuous online visibility
* SEO is the cheapest marketing tool even on the net


Some useful questions to ask an SEO include:

* Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
* Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
* Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
* What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
* What's your experience in my industry?
* What's your experience in my country/city?
* What's your experience developing international sites?
* What are your most important SEO techniques?
* How long have you been in business?
* How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?