What is search engine optimization (SEO)?

We have a guest blogger this month with detailed information about SEO. An essential tool for anyone marketing on the internet today. Erica Darcy is an SEO consultant with experience working with small, mid-size and large companies including fortune 500 corporations.

She has great things to say!

You've spent time and money developing a website for your business, now you're wondering where all those new customers you should be getting are.

Why can't you find your site on Google, Yahoo or MSN?

Why is your competitor's site showing up and not yours?

No, it's not magic or some sort of trick. It's a process called search engine optimization or SEO.

What is search engine optimization?
SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural (also called organic) search results for targeted keywords. What this means is if your website is a community for dog lovers, like dogster.com, when you search for “dog community site”on Google, Yahoo or another search engine you would want to see dogster.com at or near the top of the results.

The higher up in the search results, the more traffic a site will receive. The top three results receive the most traffic and it decreases as you go further down the page. Very few searchers will go beyond the second or third page of results.

SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

How does it work?
As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users.

Basically, SEO works by focusing on creating a good site both for your visitors and for the search engines.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the other school of thought on SEO. Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and usually remove them.

Using black hat techniques can get your site banned from the search engines. It may work for the short term, but it's not a sustainable model. It's not easy to get a site re-indexed after it has been banned. I've had new clients who have come to me after being banned, and it took months to clean up the site and to get re indexed.

How do I get started?
SEO works best when it is included from the very beginning. Before you design the site, before a single line of HTML gets written you need to research your keywords. These will be the basis of everything for the site. SEO when it is built into a new site is more cost effective then when doing it as an afterthought.

If you have an existing site, not to worry, there are plenty of things you can do to improve your site too. You start in the same place as well – researching your keywords.

When is the SEO done?
Never. SEO is a continual process of optimizing, measuring and seeing what works best for your unique site. Just like your website should be updated from time to time, your SEO needs to be measured and re-evaluated. The search engines change the way they index results frequently, so your site needs to change as well.

Am I guaranteed results?
No. there is no way to guarantee a site will rank in a certain position in the natural or organic results. No reputable consultant or company will ever guarantee results. That disclaimer being said, you should see improvements within 3-6 months of starting a SEO campaign.

Many Thanks to Erica Darcy for this informative post. She can be reached at

emhdarcy@gmail.com

http://mhvtheater.blogspot.com
http://thefrequentbookworm.blogspot.com