What is SEO?

by Ash on October 13, 2009

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often considered the more technical part of web marketing. It can be defined as the activity of optimizing web pages or whole sites in order to make them more visible to search engines, thus achieving higher positions in search results.

One of the basic truths of SEO is that, despite what you may have heard, there is no guarantee that you will achieve top ratings. However, if you set realistic goals – i.e to get into the top 30 results in Google for a particular keyword, rather than be the number one for 10 keywords in 5 search engines, you will feel happier and more satisfied with your results.

Although SEO helps to increase the traffic to a site, SEO is not advertising. SEO techniques can help to achieve top placement because your site is relevant to a particular search term, not because you pay. The efforts used to create relevant terms on your website are referred to as keyword optimisation. In reality, a web page may only be optimised for one or two keywords. This focus helps you to achieve high ranking in Google for those keywords.

SEO, depending on your objectives and budget, may be an ad-hoc activity or a permanent solution. Sometimes it is enough to do some generic SEO in order to rank highly in search engines – for instance, if you are a leader for rare keywords, then little effort is required in order to achieve a satisfactory placement. However, in most cases, constant effort needs to be applied to SEO for it to be truly effective. If you plan to do some basic SEO, it is essential that you understand how search engines work and which items are most important .

If you want to understand more about SEO we recommend two websites which are excellent sources of information: www.seochat.com and www.seomoz.com.