roccablog - pragmatic e-commerce and seo » Blog Archive » SEO Executive Summary - SEO 101

The term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is usually used to describe the process of executing a set of techniques designed to increase a websites natural or organic result rank on a search engine results page. (SERP).

(In other words: Showing up as high as possible on google/yahoo/etc.. results page for a particular keyword or key phrase).

Showing up higher in the results rankings (SERPs) will get you more traffic and usually better traffic to your site - which can mean a better chance of reaching your online business goals.

The reference to organic or natural here refers to SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ratings.

SEO is not the same function as paid web advertising with a service like google adWords or Yahoo Search Marketing. More on this topic in the next section.

* A very important factor in SEO is that the above techniques need to be targeted for your website to obtain a high rank based on certain relevant keyword searches. For example: If you have a retail electronics store that sells TVs in Columbus, Ohio - it may not be very profitable to optimize your site to the word “TV”. Someone who searches for “TV” may live in India or she may want to know what the TV schedule is tonight - where if you optimize your site to the “relevant” keywords “buy flatscreen columbus ohio” - your ROI (Return on Investment) is much higher. A big part of making SEO work for your business is determining what keywords are the best keywords to optimize your site for.
A successful SEO process applies a world-class business analysis system to determine your web-based business goals - (lead/contact, name recognition, top of mind, $Sale) - and then works the technical functions of SEO to optimize your siteusing the above techniques to rank your site on smartest keywords and phrases determined through our business analysis process. A good SEO consultant develops and analyzes your corporations web-based CPA (Cost Per client Acquisition), Profit and ROI to help shape your SEO strategy. We then study your competitors and match up the most profitable keywords with your Buying Cycle.

A number of factors are important when SEO optimizing a website:

1. The breadth of content and structure of the website’s copy and page layout (is your website an “authority” on a topic?)

2. HTML and meta-tags (the website HTML ad CSS code is recommended by google to validate to W3C industry standards 3. All your web pages exhibit good and relevant google recommended guidelines for webmasters

3. Other technical aspects beyond the scope of this document (Search Engine Friendly URLs, page redirects, minimal script code, etc.)

4. Search engine submission process (filling out the forms to add your site to yahoo or google and others)

5. The amount and relative importance of external links pointing to the website (*this is very important and may not be an evident thing for people new to the SEO concept). Stated another way - the more relevant websites that have a link to your websites, the higher ranked your pages will be (again - if your website is an “authority” on a topic - more people will link to your site).

6. Abstaining from utilizing “unethical” SEO practices (aso known as “black hat technqiues” - if it sounds too good to be true when you are talkingto a SEO firm - it probably is)

7. The age of the website (older = more weight in rankings)

8. All meta tags like keywords, description, and title are in each of your web pages and relevant to the pages

All of these factors work together in similar but slightly different ways for all the major search engines such as google, yahoo, ask.com, MSN, even most major non-US sites such as baidu.com to determine your site’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings.

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