Search Engine Optimization

Chapter 1. Search Engine Optimization

SEO—short for Search Engine Optimization—is the art, craft, and science of driving web traffic to web sites.

Web traffic is food, drink, and oxygen—in short, life itself—to any web-based business.

Some web sites depend on broad, general traffic. These businesses need hundreds of thousands or millions of hits per day to prosper and thrive. Other web businesses are looking for high-quality, targeting traffic. This traffic is essentially like a prequalified sales prospect: already interested and able to buy your product.

This PDF has the tools and information you need to draw more traffic to your site, and build your bottom line. You’ll learn how to effectively use PageRank and Google itself—effective use of SEO means understanding how Google works: how to boost placement in Google search results, how not to offend Google, and how best to use paid Google programs. You’ll also learn how to best organize your web pages and web sites, apply SEO analysis tools, establish effective SEO best practices, and much more.

When you approach SEO, take some time to understand the characteristics of the traffic that you need to drive your business. Then go out and use the techniques explained in this PDF to grab some traffic—and bring life to your business.

SEO’s Evolution

Originally fairly narrowly conceived as a set of techniques for rising to the top of search engine listings, search engine optimization, or SEO, has conceptually expanded to include all possible ways of promoting web traffic.

Learning how to construct web sites and pages to improve—and not harm—the search engine placement of those web sites and web pages has become a key component in the evolution of SEO. This central goal of SEO is sometimes called core SEO (as opposed to broader, non-core, web traffic campaigns, which may include paid advertisements).

Search engine placement means where a web page appears in an ordered list of search query results—it’s obviously better for pages to appear higher up and toward the beginning of the list returned by the search engine in response to a user’s query.

Not all queries are created equal, so part of effective SEO is to understand which queries matter to a specific web site. It’s relatively easy to be the first search result returned for a query that nobody else cares about.

Clearly, driving traffic to a web site can make the difference between commercial success and failure. So SEO experts have come to look at search engine placement as only one of their tools—and to look at the broader context of web technologies and business mechanisms that help to create and drive traffic.

SEO is rapidly evolving into an advertising discipline that must be measured using the metrics of cost-effectiveness that are applied to all advertising techniques.

SEO at its Core

The core practices of good SEO are fairly simple:

• Understand how your pages are viewed by search engine software

• Take common sense steps to make sure your pages are optimized from the viewpoint of these search engines

  Fortunately, this essentially means practicing good design, which makes your sites easy to use for human visitors as well.

• Avoid certain over-aggressive SEO practices, which can get your sites blacklisted by the search engines

From a broader viewpoint, good SEO involves creating an effective business campaign: understanding your sales proposition and benefits, creating a strategy for drawing and converting prospects, and being better at what you do than your competition.