SEO – or Search Engine Optimization – is an Internet marketing process that is designed to increase rankings in search engines through “organic” or “natural” listings, as opposed to paid search engine inclusion.  SEO is considered the technical part of online marketing because of the requisite skills in analysis, problem solving, programming and other high level technical skills.

How SEO Started – A Brief History

When the Internet became popular in the mid 1990′s,  search engines were taking hold as the primary means of entry into new websites.  Webmasters learned that websites could be used to make money, and realized early on that if they were found in a search engine, they got more traffic, and hence more money.

Soon after, webmasters started reverse engineering the search engines, and took what they learned to rank their money making sites to the top.  They were the SEO pioneers, and though the search engine algorithms have changed drastically since those first SEO moments, the principles still apply.

Search engines have improved upon their algorithms, and give more relevant results, but the work of the SEO specialist is still the same – to reverse engineer what the search engine is doing, and apply this knowledge to rank sites higher in the search engines.

SEO As a Marketing Tool

For many businesses, SEO is one of the cheapest forms of advertising that they will ever see.  The figures vary, but there is an ROI of between 4 and 8 times what you get from traditional marketing.

Every business has a website, and every business owner has heard the phrase “location, location, location”.  Because there isn’t a physical location, you have to build the roads to your site – that what SEO is.  SEO builds the roads (links) to your site, so that you can be found.

This would be akin to putting your business in the middle of nowhere, and paying for roads to be built, and getting businesses to build up around you to form a community.  It’s cost-prohibitively expensive to do in the real world, but in the online world, that’s exactly what happens.  You build your own community around your business.

About 90% of all search engine users never go to page 2 of a search engine result page.  Read that carefully.  If you are on page 2 of your search terms, you won’t be found.

Contrast that to about 80% of all search engine clicks go to positions 1, 2 & 3 – so being in the top 3 results of a search engine could boost your web traffic through the roof.

On Page SEO Factors

On your webpage, there are a few things that every website owner can do to their website that will dramatically increase the chances that a search engine finds their content more valuable, and ranks them higher.

The biggest, number one factor is to make sure that your HTML title tag is optimized on every page for the content that you have on that page.  Why?

Because search engines use the title as the basis of what the rest of the page is.  If there’s a disconnect, then you don’t get brownie points, and you lose out on an SEO ranking opportunity.

There are other on page SEO factors that are taken into consideration, but making sure that you have good readable content to your readers, and a proper title to match, will make your readers happy, and the search engines usually follow suite.

Off Page SEO Factors

There are also a variety of SEO factors that you can’t change on your website, known as off page SEO factors.  These are things like backlinks from another site to your site, cross links from within your page, and social media links and discussions.

There’s also some other factors, such as how fast your site loads up (so have a fast host),  how long you’ve had your domain name, how long your domain name is registered for, if your IP address shares hosting with a bad neighbor ( a good argument for a VPS or dedicated server), and a variety of other factors.

All in all, Google says that they have over 200 factors (both on and off page) that effect SEO.  Of course they won’t tell us directly what those things are, but SEO specialists have a pretty good idea of what they are, and we’re testing those things all the time.

WhiteHat vs BlackHat SEO

This is the age old drama of good vs evil.

WhiteHat SEO techniques are the methodologies that are designed to be long-lived, have lasting effects, and are generally sanctioned by search engines, and industry professionals.  These are also referred to as ethical SEO practices, because they are doing what is generally considered to be good natured, and not trying to game the system.

BlackHat SEO practices are those SEO methods that are designed to fool the search engines, and give different results to the search engines than to the human visitor.  These are also, not surprisingly, referred to as unethical SEO practices because of there generally unapproved methods.

Why You May Need Professional  SEO Services

Most businesses can benefit from additional web traffic and exposure through SEO services.  Of course a lot of this depends on what your marketing budget is, how soon you need to see ROI, and how much of your marketing budget is allocated to Internet marketing efforts.

In today’s world, over 80% of the world uses search engines as a means to check out prices, products and services.  If they aren’t finding you, who are they finding?

Credit: Much of this information is taken from Wikipedia’s page on Search Engine Optimization