What Is SEO?
One question that always comes back as a boomerang to haunt most webmasters is, “What really is SEO?” A simple question with plenty of complex answers. Let’s seize this opportunity to decode the holy grail of Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
The Definition
SEO is quite simply a practice (the experts believe it’s a process) of modifying, improving all aspects of your website (internal and external) to direct more traffic (read visitors) from the various search engines. SEO firms are many and varied; some SEO firms focus on specialized areas, while many others have a more general approach towards this process. Moreover, the optimization of your website for the different Mega Search Engines takes into consideration several unique factors that can be loosely classified as website optimization.
Search engine optimization is a discovery of various aspects that have the potential to generate targeted traffic, while ensuring that your website is not just search engine friendly but also well linked and marketed by utilizing the intrinsic offerings of your business.
Want a more complicated jargonized definition of SEO?
The Reason
As a webmaster you may wonder why your website needs SEO at all. Let’s consider this. According to comScore’s study on search engine rankings for America in the year 2008, it’s been found that Google (the big daddy of search engines) is at the top of the list. It commands a market share of 53% alone (an increase of 3% from 50% in September 2007. (Check the graph below). In January 2008 alone, Google received 7.7 billion search queries (Google search – 6.2 billion and YouTube – 1.5 billion).
Almost all the internet traffic is directed by the big search engines namely, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL, and AskJeeves. The most important way to ensure your website’s success is to… be discovered by the web spiders or the search engines. If your website content doesn’t exists in the databases of these SEs, you simply haven’t arrived and are anonymous, hence, unsuccessful. Irrespective of who or what your website caters to (services, content, products, information etc) search engines are, unarguably, the only method to navigate for a majority of the web users.
Essentially, search engine optimization is a way of making your website attractive enough for SEs to discover it and direct traffic so that they can be converted into potential customers, ensuring success of your venture. Studies have repeatedly proven that search engine driven traffic can make or break your business. Not to be overlooked are facts that targeted traffic also provides free (or paid) publicity, exposure, and (of course) revenue for your company.
The Benefit
As a business owner, website owner, or SEO specialist, you’ll want to work hard to make sure that the big search engines find your site and throw it within the first 20 results for a targeted keyword. Why? Here’s why:
• Google has a market share of 53% - 58% for current year
• Yahoo has 22.9% market share
• Microsoft has 9.8-10% market share
• AskJeeves has 4.6% market share and
• AOL or Time Warner has 4.6% market share as well.
So, in this introductory article on What is SEO, we’ll just like to say – making an investment in SEO (time, money, and sweat) will definitely bring you exceptional return, albeit you need to be patient.
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By Jeremy Hermanns | June 11, 2008 | Filed Under About, Google, SEO Advice, Yahoo!
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