While learning more about online marketing I’m sure you’ve came across the term SEO and wanted to know more about what it is. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This means to optimize your site so that it will be indexed and placed in the search engine result’s organic list, such as Google’s list of results.
Many people think that they can just pay the search engines to be included in their list of results. This isn’t true! You can’t pay them to be listed in their natural search results, which is the primary list that people look at. Your site has to be optimized exactly the way the search engines’ computerized system wants it to be if you expect to be included on the list.
Google, and the other search engines, does have what’s called a Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing program where you can pay for ads that are included on a different list, but your site still must be optimized in a certain way to be on this list too. When you go to Google and type in a search for something, the list of results are sites, blogs, articles, PR releases, videos, and so on that’ve been indexed in Google.
Before those webpages are placed in the index, Google’s robot (sometimes called a spider) “crawls” the content on every one of the pages. After the pages are in the index, Google’s robot then decides the relevancy of each web page to the search term that was typed in, listing the pages by relevancy to that term.
As an example, let’s just say that somebody is looking in Google for the phrase “how to unclog a drain”. In this example, you might have a plumbing site that’s related to that phrase but if the pages of your site isn’t optimized correctly for Google, then none of your web pages will be listed in the results. Your target market will struggle to find your site.
You need to create a SEO Website, it requires a lot of work and time to get it listed on the 1st page of results for certain terms. There are several SEO elements that must be included on your site, and there are factors that come into play that are not directly implemented on your site.
You see, there are two forms of SEO: On Page Optimization and Off Page Optimization (which include having links from other sites directing to your site). Both forms are necessary if you want to get higher rankings than your competitors.
