SEO - A Basic Overview

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be quite overwhelming for marketers and companies with no or limited knowledge of the subject. Many business and marketing professionals are still unfamiliar with search optimization.



This article is intended to give a basic overview of SEO. To get more familiar with SEO, first we need to take a step back and explain Search Engine Marketing (SEM).



SEM versus SEO



Search Engine Marketing is an Internet marketing strategy that promotes a website with the intention of increasing visibility to the search engines - such as Google, Bing and Yahoo - driving more traffic to said website. In other words, SEM is used to drive more users to a website from the search engines.



SEM encompasses techniques like, paid placements, contextual advertising or search advertising, paid search engine placements and search engine optimization. Any marketing techniques that drive users from the search page to a website is considered part of SEM.



A paid advertisement on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), called a Pay Per Click ad, is considered part of SEM, because it directs Internet users from the search results page to the website when the ad is clicked on. A link from a relevant partner website, a website that has related content or similar content to the landing page, is considered part of SEM, because the search engines use these links, called back-links, to determine whether the landing page has any authority.



Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving a website’s PageRank, or visibility in the search engines. Different techniques are used, such as white-hat and black-hat SEO. The better the visibility of a website or the higher a website ranks in the search results page, the more traffic it gets from the search engines.



SEO techniques used to increase the number of visitors to a website are: link building, social marketing,



White-hat versus black-hat SEO

Black-hat SEO can return quicker results, however, the search engines are catching on to these tactics and penalizing websites employing such techniques and ultimately removing them from their search results pages. Part of black-hat strategies are: spamming, article syndication or "article spinning" (the process of duplicating an article and making minor changes to it), viral campaigns, keyword stuffing, link farms.



White-hat SEO uses organic ranking. Organic placement means: unpaid and natural ranking in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). White-hat SEO uses techniques that optimize the natural way a website evolves, gradually placing such website higher in the SERP.



Ranking well in the SERP does not happen overnight. Businesses who are serious about their long-term goals consider white-hat practices only.



Search engines



Search optimization closely follows the workings of search engines and what users search for online. SEO tunes into the search engines and their expected behavior.



Although the specific workings and algorithms used by various search engines are not available to the public, certain behavior has been fairly constant and SEO strategies have developed around it.



In general, search engines return a list of websites that they think are most relevant to a user’s search term. For example, if a user enters "free online music", Google returns a list of websites that provide free online mucic, like Napster, Jango, Playlist, Grooveshark etc.



Being the largest search engine, with 66.1% market share per September 2010, the SEO campaign’s main focus will be on Google’s search box. There are many factors that come into play when Google selects websites to display in its SERP, but in general, the results will be relevant to the user’s keyword phrase.



SEO components



With Google being the biggest player in the field, most SEO campaigns are tuned into its expected behavior. The main components of an SEO campaign are link building and on-page SEO.



Link building refers to the process of generating quality and authoritative links to a website. These links can be created through a partnership with another relevant website. For example: if a company sells insurance plans, it might consider asking another financial institution to place a link to the insurance website on their company website.



Another example of link building is the creation of articles surrounding the website’s topic. If we take the insurance company’s website as an example, they could have quality articles written about their insurance packages with a few keywords linking to their website. These articles are posted on quality article websites, blogs and forums.



On-page SEO refers to the content of the landing page and entire company website. The content needs to be well written, relevant to the user and relevant to the search engines. Originally, website developers would stuff the website with keywords they thought were relevant to a user’s online search. Although that is no longer the case nowadays, SEO copywriting is posing a new threat to article marketing.



Copywrite articles basically are articles that are being reused and tweaked slightly to include a company’s keywords. Most of the time they don’t include any truly relevant information and they don’t read well. Search engines are getting increasingly effective at identifying these articles and penalizing the websites that they link to.



In short, on-site SEO or content writing needs to be unique and relevant to the website, satisfying a user’s intent. That intent can be to find out more about a topic, buy a product or service, research a specific brand etc.



To find out more information about SEM and SEO, white-hat practices and organic search optimization, visit FatToad SEO, a Denver based SEO and advertising company covering all of the US, Canada and parts of Latin America. FatToad claims to be more transparent, more ethical and more results oriented than other SEO companies.



Their search engine and advertising experience comes directly from the source: Google and DoubleClick advertising. Request a free no-obligation quote or talk to a consultant for more information.



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