Wednesday, September 9, 2009

What is SEO - Definition of Search Engine Optimization

For many of those who are not having much information or knowledge on what SEO is all about and trying to find out the real definition for SEO here comes a useful and good post on it from shoemoney which is quite very useful for beginners (even for experts).

I would like to give some snippets from that article here. Let me start first with
"An SEO is someone who understands how people search for information (on the web and in other ways) and ensures that they or their clients are visible in the unpaid listings that are provided. A search marketer, by the way, is someone that ensures listing in both paid and unpaid listings."
"SEO is the combination of tactics and strategies, including, but not limited to, optimization of information architecture, usability, content focus, audience targeting, design, development, keyword research, keyword placement, link building, social media marketing and any other online or offline branding/marketing elements that support the goal of receiving more traffic from search engines."

"Making changes to the on-page and off-page relevance of a web page in an effort to increase the volume of quality traffic from the search engines."

SEO is the art and science of publishing and marketing content in a way that brings significant profitable and targeted traffic to your website. As the web has grown and Google has become more sophisticated, the field of SEO has been aggressively merging with traditional marketing, with emphasis on branding, framing, story telling, user engagement, viral marketing, and public relations.

Abraham Lincoln once said “With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.” That is where profitable sustainable SEO is headed.

How do I define SEO? Good question – there are a number of thoughts that come to mind:

1. the right answer – SEO is something that helps a website to increase it’s ranking in a search engine.
2. my ‘historical’ answer (ie what I would have answered a few years ago) – SEO is about manipulating Search Engines in order to get them to send you as much traffic as possible.
3. the ‘in practice’ answer (ie how it impacts me these days) – SEO for me these days is a combination of:
• about knowing some of the general principles that help a site or page to rank well in search engines
• building the best quality site that I can with content that meets the needs of readers (and as a result attracts links from other sites).
I guess I’ve come to learn that when you build a high quality website that SEO tends to largely look after itself.

Search Engine Optimization is the practice of improving a sites’ content, code, server settings, internal structure and external linking, with the intent of making the site rank higher in the search engines. If done well, SEO is a part of each (online) marketing act, resulting in the improved visibility of the site.
Note that I do NOT think that a site should rank higher than “it’s meant to be” if there IS such a thing. In the end, SEO should make a site WORTHY of a higher ranking, not push it beyond what it’s worth. In practice, this means that if a site is sh*t, link building for it is neigh to impossible, so it won’t work, and we’ll tell people to improve their site. That means that in the end, an SEO is more off a total online marketer and site consultant than just someone pulling some tricks to quickly make a site rank better.

Now everone has come up with their own definitions and views above. Let me take the pleasure of defining SEO in my own terms here too :)
SEO is the process of improving the quality and quantity of a website in the search engines; Where in Quality comes up with the relavent (quality) links pointing out to your website and quantity is the number of website links which are coming in to your websites.

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