What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization and in simple terms, it is the process of optimizing content for placement within the search engines results. Since the inception of the search engines, SEO has always been main focus of online marketers for traffic generation. This has changed somewhat over the years as many realize the power of direct targeted traffic, however, SEO will always be a high priority.

There are many different tactics used to make "content" rank well within the search results, including the design, content itself, meta tags, keywords and many more factors included. The truth is though, marketers have been tactically trying to game the search engines for a long time now and Google in particular work very hard to keep all their ranking factors to themselves. This doesn't stop people successfully gaming the system, but lately it's becoming increasingly more difficult.

The goal of search engines is to make results within their system most relevant to what the end user/searcher is looking for. To do this, Google (and other engines) use an algorithm to determine what's most relevant to the end user. Over the years the algorytms have become far more complex and better equipped to weed out crappy websites that offer no real value to the visitor. This has resulted in many consistent changes to search results over the years, and marketers are having to constantly come up with new ways to beat the system.

Okay, I think I'm getting a little off topic here. Let's just stick to SEO for today and further down the line we'll delve further into strategies and tactics on how to rank well in search results.

Why SEO Is Important:

The biggest factor in wanting to rank well within the search engines is because the traffic is free. I say "free" but of course we must place some kind of value on our time, don't we? The appeal to optimize our websites for higher positions in search results is pretty obvious it seems. Although SEO is not the most stable form of marketing your online business, it certainly entices many webmasters to put a lot of effort into it because of the low costs and potential high profits.

It's much more effective (most often) to drive targeted traffic to your website through other strategies like, forum marketing, social marketing, article marketing and any paid traffic sources. In this way we can gauge exactly how much of a price we have to pay, either through time or money. But, wouldn't it be nice to have a slice of the search traffic coming to our websites too.

People come online in their droves every day searching for solutions to their problems. When they type in a search phrase looking for more information, it would be nice if they ended up on our website. With highly targeted keywords and high search volume keywords, we can get a lot of free traffic. It's a much slower process than any other method out there, but it can be very profitable if you have a strategy in place that gets results.

Big name brands can actually be hurt if they do not rank well in search engines. Outside marketing efforts drive plenty of traffic onto the search engines every day, and all big name brands want to be the first result people see when they venture online. It helps further solidify their authority.

Different Mediums Of SEO:

There are a few different mediums of SEO and each play a different role depending on what strategies are being implemented by marketers. Usually we will use as many different mediums to help rank our content within the search results... diversity is very important. The main forms of SEO are... Blogs, Articles and Websites. We will no doubt delve into these further when we get into the nitty gritty on SEO practices and techniques. For today, that's about it for an introduction to SEO.

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