What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an ongoing process of researching, analyzing, and creating keywords from an existing website; then using this data to increase the amount of visitors (traffic) to a website through the major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN.  The goal of an SEO campaign is to increase the visibility of a website’s most important keywords on the search engine results.  This is known as the “natural” or “organic” positioning of a keyword.

Time is also a factor in any search engine optimization campaign, with the general rule of thumb “the sooner the better.”  The sooner a website begins targeting its major keywords, the better chance those keywords will see improvement in the search engines.  Although websites domains that have existed for years typically have an advantage when it comes to search engine optimization, brand new websites also have a real opportunity to begin SEO marketing with great success. SEO can be tailored to target different type of search engine functions and crawlers, such as searching locally and searching through images through the use of alt tags.

Search Engine Optimization specifically takes into account the way the major search engines “spider” or “read” a website.  Part of the strategy for increasing visibility of a website takes into account how these major search engines’ algorithms and crawler programs operate, what priorities they have and the frequency they crawl through a website.  A sample SEO marketing campaign can include both on-page, and off-page marketing.  The on-page marketing efforts may include going into a site’s code, and optimizing certain aspects of the code (META tags, alt tags) to be more easily read by the search engines.  The on-page optimization also may include identifying and fixing trouble spots on a website that may prevent a spider from accurately and thoroughly crawling a site. 

The term "SEO" can also pertain to the marketing industry that targets these techniques specifically.  Parts of this industry may include consultants who perform the marketing for clients, or in-house employees and teams that work to optimize a company’s website.