What is SEO?

SEO is the continuous practice of making your website as "attractive" as possible to search engines. By practice we refer to it as a bit of art, skill and science. The ultimate goal with SEO is to get high placement on major search engines like Google and Yahoo. If you can manage to get high placement (page ranking) on search engines it means lots of free traffic to your site, which of course in returns means more exposure for your products or services. But wait! It simply it not that easy! Imagine if every company told their web developer that they want to rank number one, one each page a client googles. We can't all be number one, right?

Search Engine Submission and SEO

Hang on one second. Remember there is a difference between SEO and Search Engine Submission. Firstly we need to optimize a website, and after that is done, we need to submit the website to the major search engines. The one thing you need to remember about search engines is that they want to reward their searchers with desired quality links. Bearing this in mind, think of a search engine as a moving target. Your current keywords may place your website on the first results page, but in a year time it may drop you down to third page. You need to make sure that you understand what your clients are looking for and how to let them find you first!

Tried and True

• Great title tags for each of your pages
• Meta keywords that match the content of your page
• Meta descriptions that accurately reflect your page contents
• Writing site copy that reflects your desired keywords
• Keeping your site's content fresh
• Building a network of external links FROM other sites TO your site

Newer Techniques

• Blogging on your site to keep the content fresh and germane
• Utilizing software to generate meta tags based on your content
• XML Sitemaping of your site
• RSS Feeds of your content
• Using social networking sites to generate a buzz about your site
• Search Engine Friendly URLs - using page names that reflect the content of your page.