What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization is the act of enhancing the quantity and quality of site traffic coming to a site or a particular web page by search engines. SEO targets unpaid, but targeted traffic rather than paid, direct traffic. This means that if someone searches for a term like “SEO”, the number of sites that come up in the results is based not on the amount of money paid to advertise them, but on the popularity of the search terms themselves.
So what is SEO and how do you know if it is right for you? Well, SEO doesn’t come cheap. It can cost you hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars to get your site optimized, but this is like getting a free car or an annual holiday every year. You simply pay for the service once and never have to pay for it again. And the best thing about this is that the longer you take to optimize your site, the more valuable your website will be to its targeted audience.
As far as SEO is concerned, there are a number of ways that you can achieve high search engine results. One way is to use keywords in your site content, headers, title and meta tags, but how much SEO does SEO really matter? Basically, SEO provides information about your website, such as the keywords in your title and meta tags, that helps the search engine understand what your page is about. In other words, SEO provides the “building blocks” of the search engine results and is therefore vitally important.
The question you need to ask yourself is whether SEO is really worth all of the time and the money that you will spend on it. This is one of the hardest questions to answer because you can easily convince yourself that SEO is worth every penny – until you actually start seeing results from your SEO campaigns. When you manage to optimize your site properly, you will be surprised at how many people click on your site to learn more about your products and services. However, when the results do start to roll in, it will be nothing like what you had imagined it would be.
If you had spent your whole week and night optimizing your site for the top search engines, you would probably have seen some initial results. However, these results would be fairly poor compared to what you would see if you optimized your site for the lower ranking search engines, such as Google and Yahoo. Optimizing for these two search engines will provide better results than you would ever get from a high ranking in the engine results, which is what you were expecting to get in the first place. The rule of thumb is: the higher you rank in search engine results, the better results you will get.
Optimizing for just one search engine won’t give you the best results. However, you should certainly not neglect all of them because they are all important. You must remember that you only get one chance to make a first impression and thus you have to act fast and sensibly. So, take some time out and plan your SEO for the long term. You will realize that the money you spend on SEO is actually an investment that pays off ten fold in the long run.