SEO Marketing and Optimization
Written by Bob Young Monday, 19 September 2011 11:23
As more people getting into online marketing, there are more interest regarding how to get visitor traffic. This topic include many things such as article marketing, link building, visitor traffic, and seo service. Together these topics are termed SEO, or search engine optimization.
SEO is a method of optimizing a website so that when someone searching for information regarding a certain topic, this website come up high on the ranking of SERP, or search engine result page. Of course this is what most website owners want - to have readers come to their sites and browse the content. SEO is a broad subject that requires some time to study in order to fully implement it. For some site owners who don't have the time or inclination, they have the options of finding some outside help that can do SEO for them.
There are many Search Engine companies. Yahoo, Bing, and Google being the major players, plus a number of smaller contenders that are still around. The major search engine companies have guidelines for website or blog owners on rules of optimization for their site. These rules are similar but different.
The guidelines are general principles and not a series of rules written in computer codes. The search engine companies generally don't specify exactly how they calculate which site is going to be ranked, because doing so will allow "gamers" to hijack search results to their advantage. This practice is termed "black hat". It aims to digging out loophole in the SE algorithm. On the other hand, "white hat" refers to SEO tactic or technique that conform to the guidelines provided by the SE company.
SEO can be done both on-site and off-site. The two ways are different from each other. For on-site optimization the important factors are keywords and relevant content, HTML tags, and domain name of the site. Whereas for off-site optimization it comes down to one thing and one thing only: getting backlinks pointing to the main site.
The single most important criteria of getting high ranking on SERP is the backlinks. The original idea of ranking a website is based on the quality content of the site. And because of the quality content of that site, other sites will gradually putting up links to that site. Search engines know that these backlinks are like vote of confidence for the site, so the relevance of information a user is search now depends on the number of inbound links a site is getting. Of course this is known to everybody nowadays. But one can't just indiscriminately build hoards of backlinks at one place and expect it to work. The backlinks should come from sites of different kinds, such as blogs, social media, article directory, bookmarking, forums, press release and news sites.
It takes time to understand what's involved in building links, as well as putting in time and effort to actually get the work done. Fortunately there are many software and SEO service companies that can do this kind of work for you. If you choose to hire outside help to do it, then take some time first to understand what the services actually do.
SEO service company may charge a very handsome fees for their link building work they do for you. At the moment it's still an open field and there's no place like a Better Business Bureau that rates such company's efficacy. So to choose an SEO company, the site owner should first do a bit of homework on what guarantee the company can give in terms of ranking result. Get some sample work or testimonials of the clients of the company may not be a bad idea either.
After all is said and done, the SEO work may be boiled down to one task: article marketing. It's a tried-and-true method of producing quality backlinks for your site.
Article marketing is basically using articles, with backlinks in them, to provide quality content for the Search Engines to index, and getting ranking boost from the backlinks therein. The work involves someone spending time to research and write up articles on a specific niche or search term, then distribute the articles to article directories or syndicated RSS sites. The sites that put up the articles should have good PR (page rank) for the links to be effective. Like many other tasks, there are help you can get if you don't want to write articles yourself. There are even software developed that can produce decent result of unique and relevant content for you.