Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quantity and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc…) via “organic” search results for targeted keywords specifically related to your business. Usually, the sooner a site is presented within the “top” search results (listings on left when doing a search) or the higher (on the page) it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit your site.  In essence, SEO defines how search algorithms work and what people search for. 

The term “search engine friendly” is used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems, URLs, and shopping carts that are easy to navigate and have been optimized for SEO.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a web site’s relevance (thus increasing ranking and in turn site traffic), SEO efforts may involve:

• A web site’s coding, presentation, and structure, as well as resolving problems, which could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully “spidering” your site.
• Efforts may include adding unique content to a web site thus ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users.
• Another class of techniques, known as “Black Hat” SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as “link farms” (pay for large quantities of outbound links; many times irrelevant) and “keyword stuffing” (overusing key words within content) that tend to harm search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove them from their indices.

In today’s market, you will find many consultants who specialize in search engine optimization, and are paid to carry out optimization initiatives on behalf of their clients and/or by employees who perform SEO services in-house.  Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design.    

As a Marketing Strategy

Because Americans read left to right and top to bottom, we look for relevant results placed near the top left of results presented and work our way across and down. Placement at or near the top of the rankings therefore increases the number of searchers who will visit our web site. However, more search engine referrals does not guarantee more sales.

SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be much more effective, depending on the site’s business goals.  A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic search traffic to web pages, it may also involve the use of paid advertising on search engines (PPC), and should include building high quality web pages that engage and persuade their audience (otherwise bounce rates will be very high - in turn money and efforts are wasted).  Technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing web sites should also be addressed, as well as setting up analytics programs to enable web site managers to measure their successes, and improving a site’s conversion rate (keeping and converting visitors into qualified prospects / customers).

In turn, SEO may generate an ROI; however, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms consistently change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals. Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, a business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors.  It is considered wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic.  A top ranked SEO blog Seomoz.org has reported, “Search marketers, in a twist of irony, receive a very small share of their traffic from search engines.” Instead, their main sources of traffic are links from other websites.  

Effective web site content should be relevant and robust and pages should have supporting themes to provide value to both site visitors and search engines.  Both want substance. 

Content is one of the most significant success factors to any web site.  In general, the more focused and robust your content is - the better off you are.  Target your writing to one primary topic (or a subset of a topic).  Your web pages should contain enough text content on each page to support the messaging and overall theme.  Shoot for a minimum of 300 words.  Less ‘can’ work, but it’s highly unlikely. 

With that, you should also create a theme amongst a group of pages within your web site to give each page legitimacy and relevance.  A search engine ranks ‘each’ page within your site and a big deciding factor is whether the pages share relevance to and support one another. Planning for 6 pages of supporting content is a good minimum for creating a theme.

Summary:  Create enough relevant, engaging content and you will have a web site your visitors will enjoy reading and to which search engines will assign high rankings.

Doing some research on Search Engine Optimization.  Thought I’d share Top 5 interesting articles with you:

1.  http://www.seobook.com/buy-now.shtml

• Dramatically Increase Website Traffic With These Easy Step-by-Step Instructions… 100% Guaranteed or Your Money Back
• Everyone should read your book. I did. I’m glad I did.” Seth Godin, NY Times Best Selling Author

2. http://www.highrankings.com/tentips.htm

• Ten Tips to the Top of the Search Engines by Jill Whalen

3. http://www.apogee-web-consulting.com/blogger/2007/11/seo-tips-top-10-google-rankings-in-24.html

• SEO Tips: Top 10 Google Rankings in < 24 Hours = Blogging + QDF

4. http://www.top10seotips.com/

• Top 10 Search Engine Optimization Tips!
• Search Engine Optimization is quickly becoming a phenomenon here in the world of Internet Marketing. Too many people make the mistake of spending thousands of dollars on Pay-Per-Click campaigns before they realize that most people click on the non-sponsored listings more than “Sponsored Results” links. There are several hundred techniques to achieve higher ranking in the search results, but these Top 10 SEO Tips are in my opinion the most valuable.

5. http://www.seoegghead.com/blog/seo/mattcuttsarama-a-summary-of-useful-stuff-matt-cutts-has-said-p112.html

• 21 Great SEO Tips from Google’s Matt Cutts

Where do you go for SEO tips and advice?

I met John P today.  He created the web site www.htmlhelp.com and suggested we read this article.  Giving you the highlights and a link for more info:

Article: Improving Search Engine Rankings / SEO: Fact vs. Fiction

Design Checklist

• Offer a site map with links that point to important parts of the site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, break it into separate pages. These help search engines locate all of the content on a site.
• Make sure each page is reachable by at least one static link. If a search engine cannot find your document, it will never show up in a user inquiry.
• Keep URL’s simple and static. Complicated URL’s are difficult for people to type and hard to remember. Additionally, longevity is a factor in search ranking (more on this later…).
• Keep the site hierarchy fairly flat. That is, each page should only be one to three clicks away from the home page. This aids both humans and machines in navigating the site.
• Avoid the unnecessary use of frames as search engines often have difficulty indexing them correctly.
• Minimize the use of Macromedia flash as well as Java applets. Although they can add useful demonstrations and animations to a site, they are not indexed by search engines.
• Since dynamic page content is expected to change frequently, the relevance to search keywords will probably not be maintained. Moving content to static pages will improve indexing and lighten the load on the Web server.
• Make sure internal pages link to the homepage to aid navigation.
• Organize content by topic and divide the site into logical sections, each focusing on a given topic. This allows search engines to better target specific information relevant to keyword searches.

Design Summary

A Web site which is optimized for search engine effectiveness will be as easy to navigate as a good book. The home page should read like a table of contents, linking visitors to relevant information organized into useful sections. Sites which feature dynamically generated content such as forums or weblogs should still incorporate static HTML pages to aid search engines. Images, animations, scripts and videos should be used only when text is inappropriate and they add to the value of a given page.

Content Checklist

• Create a useful, information rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content or links. Search engines can’t read images, and neither can people with visual disabilities.
• Choose topics which are original and unique.
• Limit pages to a reasonable size. If the content is lengthy offer a Table of Contents and divide the information into usable pages. This also allows each section to be more targeted by search engines.
• Exercise “Conservation of Words”. Once you’ve gotten the message across, stop writing. Verbosity for the sake of increasing “keywords” will only drive real visitors away. And that’s not good for traffic building!
• Proof-read, spell check and get peer reviewed. Every site can benefit from multiple opinions and multiple content edits. If your content isn’t good enough to be published in the newspaper it won’t be good enough to compete on the Web against millions of other pages.
• Make sure the TITLE element for your document is concise and accurate. The page TITLE is used by search engines to display link text as the result of a search.
• Ensure that each IMG element includes an ALT atribute.
• Provide links to interesting, related content when appropriate, but keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.
• Always reference citations and sources. This indicates to search engines that the content is of research quality.
• Illegal content within a page will most likely result in that page’s omission from search engines. Especially in certain countries.

Content Summary

Put more time and energy into developing content that will be useful to people, and less into worrying about it being “pretty” or where it is going to show up in search engines. You will get many times the return on your investment.

Linking Checklist

• Search engines monitor the rate of acquisition of links to a site. Too many, too fast could indicate “unnatural” link buying activity and harm a site’s rankings. This is another reason not to buy into any “buy a bunch of links” schemes.
• Search engines also monitor the rate of removal of incoming links to a site. If several sites begin simultaneously removing links it may indicate a user-affecting issue.
• Broken outgoing links which are not rectified promptly will indicate that a site is infrequently updated to search engines and can potentially harm rankings.
• Affiliations between a linking site and the linked site may be inspected by some search engines. If for example, they share an IP address or have a common postal address on the “contact us” page, the search engine will, at best, ignore the link.
• Be sure that sites you link to are relevant to the topic of your Web page and will be appreciated by your visitors.

Links Summary

Links, paid or otherwise, are generally considered a good thing for search engine rankings; however, the link source must be relevant, constant and reputable.

See entire article here: http://www.htmlhelp.com/feature/seo/

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Search Engine Theory
• Designing for Search Effectiveness
• Content Recommendations
• Technical Recommendations
• Site Linking & Popularity
• Other Factors
• Pitfalls
• Summary
• Resources