SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION: demystified

Back in the late 90s having a website was considered a novelty. Everyone saw this as an opportunity to expand their business and there was a certain status associated with having a web site. At this time knowledge about what it takes to make a web site and what is involved was primitive. This lack of general understanding led to the DOT COM BOOM and a lot of people where making money off of other people’s ignorance. Eventually word spread because the information spread and the bubble burst on a lot of these “web” companies. Today we have the same things going on with the SEO and SEM industry.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be broken down into two main categories: on-page and off-page. In addition you have two different kinds of SEO organic and paid. Organic SEO can be the most cost effective way of optimizing your page but it takes patience to get results. Paid SEO involves using a google adwords account to manage a PPC (pay per click) campaign on google ( I will cover paid SEO in another post)

ON PAGE SEO: On page optimization is everything your webmaster can do in order to make your keywords stand out and be read by search engines. This is accomplished by having keywords repeat in the content of the site and be in line with your meta descriptions, and tags ( a few lines of code containing your keywords). To increase the relevancy make sure you include your keywords in your tags (alternate text for images) and use unique titles for every page on your website. Once you have these keywords set up all you have to do is to create new content for your site that also has these keywords ( ie. a blog or a newsfeed). Google likes pages that update frequently and if you post quality new information that has relevancy to your keywords you will be in good shape.

In order to increase readability of your site you should avoid building your site in FLASH or having large images load when the site is loading. This is part of the optimization process too because you want your site to load fast and be read by as many people and search engines as possible.

That is my very brief overview of on-page organic search engine optimization. I will be explaining Off Page SEO, Paid SEO and SEM in upcoming posts.