Wednesday, November 23, 2011

What is SEO, and why should I care?


SEO is an acronym for “Search Engine Optimisation.” It refers to the procedures, efforts and thought processes behind improving a site’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).
A relatively young idea, optimising websites for better visibility in the search engines began to gain momentum in the mid-90s. As it became clear that sites higher-up in the SERPs reached larger audiences, received more traffic and ultimately made more money, the interest in this new idea was spreading quickly. By the time Google arrived in 1998, SEO was becoming commonplace in online marketing and continued growing at an amazing rate, year-over-year.

Today, SEO is a multi-billion dollar industry that grows substantially every year. It is also now acknowledged as a necessity for businesses wanting to achieve or build greater online success
SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines.
The aim of SEO is to maximise targeted types of valuable traffic to a website from search engines by improving the visibility of said website in Google organic or unpaid SERPS.

How it works?

Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. The whole process of searching happens instantly with Google instant search or in a fraction of second involving 5 steps which are crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.
Ø  CRAWLING - First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two.
Ø  INDEXING - After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you – to get higher rankings.
Ø  PROCESSING - When a search request comes, the search engine processes it – i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index with the search string.
Ø  CALCULATING RELEVANCY - There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatags. That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string. What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, Bing, etc. periodically change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason (the other is your competitors) to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you'd like to be at the top.
Ø  RETRIEVING - The last step in search engines' activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser – i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites. 

Increased Internet Exposure - One of the most important advantages that come with SEO is the increase of traffic that occurs. The chances of attracting an increased amount of visitors is rather high when successful SEO places your website within the top 10 or top 20 of the most popular search engine results on the Web. When users search for the information they require, they are most likely to choose from the selections appearing on the first page of results.

Boost Business Efforts - If your website is being used to promote and sell products or services, SEO can help by improving a site's ability to sell more.

Highly qualified traffic - A well-executed search engine optimisation campaign can deliver traffic actively searching for the products or services you offer bringing increased business enquiries from web site visitors wanting to know more about you.

Cost efficiency - Search engine optimisation out performs other forms of online marketing in terms of return on investment and generation of qualified leads and also saves you money on your web site running costs due to the savings on your monthly bandwidth bills and faster page loading for visitors without broadband encouraging them to stay on your web site.

Increased online visibility

Getting your site seen on as many search engines and directories as possible will help you reach more of your target audience bringing you a greater web presence as more people know about you and link back to you. A website that's optimised for search engines is also optimised for users too.

Brand Awareness

You can hardly claim to be the absolute best in the business when no one has ever heard of your company. Sometimes you need to work on making people aware of your company even if that doesn't result in immediate sales, but you will gain more revenue in the long term by building yourself up and ensuring that your target market knows who you are. If your website is showing in search engine results pages then users will spot your company name, and the more they see it, the more they will think that you must have expertise in this area.

Internet Marketing Strategy
 Explore strategies and techniques that you can use on the Internet that will enhance and support your business's overall marketing objectives.

Your business can:
  Start with a web promotion plan and an effective web design and development strategy.
  Get ranked at the top in major search engines through search Optimization Techniques.
  use Email Marketing Effectively.
  Dominate your marketing niche with affiliate, reseller, and associate programs. 
  Build a responsive opt-in email list.
  Publish articles or get listed in news stories.
  Write and publish online press releases.
  Facilitate and run contests and giveaways via your web site.
  Blog and interact with your visitors.


  
SMO

Facts

Social Media Optimisation, also known as Social Marketing Optimisation or SMO is becoming increasingly important as the internet matures. The sheer popularity of social networking websites such as mySpace, FaceBook and Bebo together with numerous other social media sites such as YouTube, Technorati and Squidoo and bookmarking sites such as Digg are far too powerful to ignore.

Social Media Optimisation is therefore the process undertaken to capitalise on the huge traffic social networking websites can bring, thus increasing online sales and brand awareness.

Social Media is becoming such a huge part of search engine optimisation as it helps to get the content out there on the internet to attract users to the website.

Social Media and Social Media Optimisation is ever increasing in importance as a marketing tool for websites. Social media marketing is about building relationships and having conversations with your customers. These conversations can help to improve your online presence with a well executed social media marketing plan.


SMO technique

·         Increase your linkability- Increase the quantity of the content with a blog and make the copy compelling so that users want to link to it, as well as ensuring that it's accessible enough so that users can find it and link to it
·         Make tagging easy- Add quick links to social book marketing sites so that users can easily click and bookmark each page, make it even simpler by pre-adding each page
·         Help your content travel- Content that is in pdf files, audio files, videos etc can also be syndicated out to these social media sites so don't forget it
·         Encourage the mash-up- Try to get more people envolved, give the users something back so they will want to link to your site, for example use RSS feeds


Looking for a provider who can help you on this? Contact us at i-proconsulting.com or email us your interest to info@i-proconsulting.com.


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