What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is compared to by some as a science. It is an on going science experiment that has a hypothesis that is constantly changing. As the internet changes so do the ways of optimization. The goals are the same. To make it so people searching the internet can find you.

With SEO being the new craze for the internet guru, it is very difficult to know what to look for in a Search Engine Optimization company. What makes this company better than the last one I searched on line for, and how will they help my company succeed? And how will this benefit my company with out harming its reputation?

One of the largest internet marketers has designed a test to weed out these answers to help make things a little easier in the decision process. This company is known as Bruce Clay, Inc; and they provide a search engine marketing tool called "SEO Tool Set" providing high end tools to help with the process of designing a professional site and by also following and upholding the terms of service provided by every search engine. Internet marketing is a way to drive traffic through free organic search traffic. Below is an example of where the paid areas are on Yahoo for example and where the free areas are located. Depending on the popularity of the keyword you are targeting you could have some major competition for example the term "merchant processing" there are 15,400,000 sites in the Yahoo results.

How can someone get to the first page of Yahoo with that many sites fighting for the same position? There is a process we take that takes time research for results to show. Most of the time however, we have seen things happen a lot faster in some industries.

Process for Increasing Organic Web Traffic

There are no secrets in search engine marketing to rank on the search engines. We hear about all these search engine updates like Google's latest update with the new data center named "Big Daddy". This update from Google has many things to improve the search experience for the searcher. One of the big things they are trying to cleanup is all the generated pages that are not useful to the person searching the internet.

That is not its only purpose but one of many, Google is not the only search engine people talk about. As a web site owner you have to know what is happening with Yahoo and MSN as well. The search engines are always improving the algorithm. What that is, is a combination of hardware and software working together to create an internal data base within itself to form guidelines that are constantly changing as the internet itself is constantly changing; but if you build a quality site with the customer in focus and not just the search engine spider; which is a program that is constantly scanning or crawling the internet to find new information and new web pages that have been recently launched. It is very important that you have your web page designed in an easy to use fashion as well as friendly for web spiders to crawl easily.

Identify Your Competition

The first step to identifying your competition is by exploring your industry online. Things are a bit different with offline competition vs. online because you may know all the companies that you battle but on line, you are competing with companies some times in different states or countries. Evaluate their web site and see what they are doing differently than you are.

Link Tracking

Links from other sites that relate to your industry are very powerful once you have determined your competition. There are many tools to help you find all the links pointing back to your site. Such as in Google Search you can type in "domain.com" site domain.com to find the listed links that Google recognizes.

Also with Yahoo they have a tool called "Yahoo Site Explorer" this tells you who is linked to you as well as what pages of your own site have been found by the Yahoo web crawler. We use the SEOTOOLSET from Bruce Clay, Inc to help us see this. Our clients have the choice to continue using the program for a monthly charge of $29.99 per month to continue conditioning the webpage.

Identify Keywords

Targeting the correct keywords for your web site is a very important step to insure that the search engines properly index your site. Let's go back to researching your competition’ what are they doing? What words are they using? How much traffic do those key words bring? There are also other ways to find keywords for your site, such as programs like Word Tracker, Overture Keyword Tool, Aaron Wall's SEO Book Tools and many others. Try to use keywords that include 2 or more words to insure a more relevant search. When you identify your keywords you are really laying out your site theme, this theme will help you build a site with an easy navigation for both your visitor and the search engine spider. Remember don't just focus on the search engine spider; make the site read well and make it very easy to use.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Organic Optimization is the goal, however there are alternatives for instant traffic such as Google Adwords and Overture .This form of traffic is found on the top and right side of the search results and can start at 10 cents a click or more depending on the keywords and the industry. This works well for anyone. We find the online stores see a huge increase in sales during the holiday season by increasing the organic search and paid search doubling the traffic and sales. The way this works is from a bidding system that others paying per click can bid higher and place their ads above you.

Most of our clients find that being 1-3 position works better than 4-6 just because the ad is seen by the searcher right away. When a searcher looks at the ad you do not have very much time to get their attention to click, so this means your ad copy must be targeted around the keywords you bid on and at the same time you must take them to a relevant landing page. Sometimes modifications to the site may need adjustments to perform better in the converting process.

Web Analytics

Using software to parse through your server log files for your web site can help you understand more of what your visitors are doing and where they came from. Example, did they search for you on Google, Yahoo or MSN to find your site. It is very informative to know what they typed in and when as well where that visitor went to. Simple information can help you make more educated modifications to the site to better the traffic as well can deliver additional information depending on your software package.

There are many software packages out there the industry is still saying that ClickTracks Optimizer is still the leader in analytics software allowing you to use log files or java script to track your web stats. They have many other choices for packages to fit your needs. If that is not in your budget you can sign up for a free analytics software from Google called Google Analytics this is a software is very easy to setup. All you need to do is signup for a Google Account and add a small script to every page in your site.