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What is SEO!

SEO – SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization – is the process of affecting the visibility of a website in a search engine’s “natural” or “organic” (not paid for) search results. SEO is all about optimizing a website for search engines.

SEO is a subset of search engine marketing. SEO is also referred as SEO copyrighting, because most of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines, deal with text. If you plan to do some basic SEO, it is essential that you understand how search engines work.

SEO is a technique for:

  • Designing and developing a website to rank well in search engine results.
  • Improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines.
  • Marketing by understanding how search algorithms work, and what human visitors might search.

What is On-Page and Off-page SEO?

Conceptually, there are two ways of optimization:

  • On-Page SEO – It includes providing good content, good keywords selection, putting keywords on correct places, giving appropriate title to every page, etc.
  • Off-Page SEO – It includes link building, increasing link popularity by submitting open directories, search engines, link exchange, etc.

Search Engine Optimization is a multidisciplinary activity that seeks to generate productive organic traffic from search engines via technically sound and connected sites by matching query intent with relevance and value. It’s a bit of a mouthful, I know. I’ve emphasized the areas that I feel are particularly important and deserve a more in-depth explanation.

SEOThe goal of SEO is not to increase traffic willy-nilly. You increase traffic by 30% but it makes no difference to the bottom line. Who cares! Productive can mean different things to different companies. Productive may mean leads or subscribers or revenue or page views.

Whatever it is, it’s important to define and track productive traffic rather than simply focusing on increasing traffic overall. I might be able to generate more traffic by adding ‘Nude’ and ‘Free’ as keyword modifiers but is that really going to bring productive traffic to a site?

This goes (way) beyond brand versus non-brand traffic, which I find to be the most rudimentary of divisions. This is having a fundamental understanding of the traffic that makes a difference to that business. That may mean moving away from high volume terms and generating less traffic overall. Don’t get saucer eyes when it comes to keyword volume. It’s about the right keywords, not the biggest keywords. (That’s what she said!)

Yet, even if you’re driving the right traffic there are other factors that contribute to a productive visit. If the focus is leads, you might realize that the call-to-action is weak, doesn’t match the query intent or competes with other elements on the page.

Perhaps the lead form itself isn’t very good either. If the goal is page views, you may realize that the design is confusing, the text hard to read and the content without a structure that allows for easy navigation.

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