what is SEO
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
What is SEO? Basic SEO Information For New Online Marketers
What is SEO? SEO is the acronym for “Search Engine Optimization”, it is the process through which websites generate traffic from search engines such as Google or Yahoo and targets specific keywords and search terms. SEO is a two part process, on-site SEO and off site. On Site refers building the site with search engines in mind, using correct markup and best practices to make sure Google is able to tell what your site is about, off-site SEO primarily revolves around link-building, although it also involves other changes done on a server level to maximize your sites visibility on Google.
On-site SEO is usually done by your developer or web designer, the basic principle is to use heading tags to help Google rank your sites content by relevance, h1 being the most important tag and should include your primary key words, and <p> being the lowest in importance level. Proper use of anchor text or link text and emphasizing important words is also an important part of on-site SEO, and can help search engine spider’s rank your site properly. Making sure your site is built using search engine friendly methods is also very important; sites built with Flash or AS3 for example are relatively invisible to search engines and will not be ranked unless wrapped in HTML.
SEO generally targets a specific keyword or search term, the words or phrases you want your site to show up for in Google or other search engines. For example, if your site is promoting African mango supplements, it would be logical to aim to be on the first page of Google for the search term ‘African Mango Supplements”, your link building campaign and online SEO will target those and similar keywords to help your site rank for those terms.
It is important for Google that each page of your site has a unique title, and description as well as unique content. Duplicated content can lead to Google penalties and lower raking for your website, it is also extremely important that all text and informative content on your site is unique and not copies from other blogs or article sites. Creating unique content can be time consuming and it might seem easier to simply copy/paste from competing sites, but not only is that illegal, it can actually hurt your rankings severely and lead to less traffic to your website.
Much of the work of what is SEO, involves building inbound links to your website from social media sources, authority sites and other sites with content relevant to your own. Once a website is built and published , without inbound links it is essentially a dessert island – a speck in the middle of nowhere with no roads or transport in or out. In years it might end up ranking for some terms, but SEO can speed up the process by building virtual entrances from other websites to the new money site.
Thanks to Web 2.0 sites, free blogging platforms and article directories building inbound links is much simpler than it used to be. Most campaigns include a combination of social media links, creating free blogs on relevant topics with links leading back to your money site & creating links from web 2.0 platforms such as Hubpages or Tumblr. Many link-building campaigns also involve media sites, such as YouTube, Vimeo or Hulu and usually use as many as possible for maximum impact.
So what is SEO? SEO is an integral part of launching any new online business or venture, and is the most effective way of generating incoming traffic and ranking higher in Google. It is important that both the site itself and the link building campaign are optimized for the targeted keywords to be the most effective and efficient.