Introducing SEO for Website
Welcome to the Search Engine Optimization. Search engine optimization has come to mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. In the strictest sense, SEO is about the on-page and off-page design strategies you can use to improve your search engine ranking. This usually means tweaking your web site, using design elements and content. And in most cases, it also means spending no money at all.
SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, is not just SEO. More accurately, SEM includes PPC or pay-per click advertising. Search engine marketing is about doing whatever you need to do to ensure that your web site ranks as high as possible in search engine results. This means not only that you make the needed changes to your web-site design, but that you also employ other tactics, like using a paid advertising program or investing in content strategies.
I lump them all into one category. The ultimate goal of SEM is to bring more people to your web site. And you can do that by improving your search engines results. You can also do that by taking advantage of a growing phenomenon on the Web, social media. Social media is a viral form of sharing information on the Web. You might think of it as a more sophisticated method of sharing your favorites or information that you think will interest other people. And using social media to improve the traffic to your web site is called Social Media Marketing, or SMM.
I vote we do away with the alphabet soup completely. All these marketing efforts have one thing in common: reaching your target audience. And today anyone who is not an SEO purist places all these marketing methods under the SEM umbrella. All of them are methods for optimizing your web site for the audience that you’re trying to reach. And as social media grow in popularity, they’re going to be affected by and included in search engine results as well.
Every now and then, you need to step away from the crowd and stop doing what everyone else is doing. In SEO, stepping out alone is usually rewarded with better traffic results. Everyone is doing the same thing. And that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t. What it means is that you should do the same thing in a different way. And that’s where the Search Engine Optimization Come in.
Throughout the pages that follow, I’ll show you the best practices for search engine optimization and provide insight into the theory behind the strategies that you’ll learn. These strategies are tested. They work. For thousands of web sites. Use them to build on. Follow the best practices of search engine optimization but do it creatively. Try something different. That’s how blogs became such a huge phenomenon. It’s how social bookmarking and social communities caught on. Someone looked at marketing in a different way and came up with a new angle.
So, use the information that you’ll find in the following pages to improve your search engine ranking. Use it to improve the traffic to your web site. But most importantly, use it to reach highly targeted customers who will take the actions you desire them to take on your web site. That customer audience is always first. Remember this as you market, keep the audience as your focus, and your efforts will be successful.
Search engine optimization is not for the faint of heart. It requires a lot of time and a lot of hard work. But what it doesn’t require is a professional. Anyone with time and the desire to do it can learn the most successful strategies of SEO. And that’s probably why there are so many SEO consultants in the world today.
Anyone can be an SEO consultant. No official certification programs exist, and no industry standards guide the development of an SEO consultant. And from one aspect, that’s good news for you. It means that you can become your own SEO consultant. And a good first step is to learn the information you’ll find in the following pages.
Of course, not everyone wants to be an SEO consultant. Your goal in picking up this book might be simply to learn about the SEO process so that you can be certain your SEO consultant, or the SEO firm you’re considering hiring, is doing the job they should be doing to help your web site rank high. That’s good.
Two types of people will get the most out of the Search Engine Optimization Bible— people who are interested in being their own SEO consultants and people who just want to know how SEO works. If you’re an SEO expert, you’ll likely find that you’re already familiar with the information contained in these pages. There might be a few tidbits that are worth your while, though, so if you need a refresher course, keep reading.
For those of you who are new to SEO, you’ll find the information you need to understand and begin implementing SEO strategies that will help improve your search engine rankings and drive better targeted visitors to your site.
Search engine optimization can be a complex process, but there are distinct areas of the process that can be addressed on their own. And that’s how you’ll find this book divided. It has four parts, each of which represents a portion of the SEO process.
Within each part are chapters that address different pieces for that step in the SEO process. And within each chapter, there are sections to help you work through that piece of the process. You'll also find four separate appendices, which provide guidelines and support for the various strategies and actions that are recommended.