Search Engine Optimization Overview

Over 60,000,000 Americans are conducting searches daily online, therefore, in order to obtain a competitive advantage it’s critical for every business to secure their position on the major search engines in order for their would be customers to find them. With 85% of all new visitors to a website originating from the major search engines, it’s obvious how important search engine rankings are but very few companies have the knowledge or the time to run an search engine marketing campaign that is going to give them the results they desire.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website. There are 2 components of the process, “On-Site” and “Off-Site” optimization. On-Site optimization deals with the coding of a website such as meta tags, internal linking structure, title tags, content development, content tagging, site mapping, URL formation and HTML code. Off-Site optimization deals with things like inbound linking, blog building, social bookmarking, directory submissions and strategic partnerships.

The following processes are critical for successful Search Engine Optimization:

• Identifying your services/products, market and competition.
• Keyword research in order to choose the keywords that best describe what products and/or services you provide.
• Conduct a keyword analysis to determine the highest value keywords possible. The “value analysis” takes into account volume, competition and likelihood of conversion.
• Analyze website and implement “On-Site” optimization.
• Conduct Off-Site optimization campaign.
• Monitoring your rankings progress.
• Results tracking through web analytics…ROI is the priority.

Lastly, any Search Engine Optimization activity must be done without breaking any search engine rules and regulations. “Black Hat” techniques such as “spamming” or “presenting content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users” can get your website dropped completely.