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.

Get the best Search Engine Marketing service now! Try our 14-day FREE trial by clicking here.

Alright, I figured I’d address this issue before it became more widely discussed (already grumbling in the forums) – and post an official SEOiQ vs. SiteSeer Challenge now.

As background: The other day a Super Affiliate Friend of mine (who shall remain nameless) informed me via conference call that he had tested out StomperNet’s SiteSeer (or “Site Seer”) application and she/he was flabbergasted at how “mediocre” it was compared to our new SEOiQ Diagnostic Test (in front of 20+ other Affiliate friends of ours) – and was amazed ours had not gone ‘mainstream’ yet.

Naturally, I figured he was simply exaggerating and stroking my ego, so I went to StomperNet to see exactly what all the hype was truly about. Unfortunately, I was met with a lot of ’shiny pennies’ and glitzy effects – and quite honestly not much substance. (I had to mute my machine after 30 seconds of the techno music from their video intro/sales piece.)

I’ve always wondered how programs/systems/applications get so popular. Clearly, salesmanship is more important than functionality, my friends (case in point).

Seriously our SEOiQ Tool blew StomperNet away…it wasn’t even a fair fight.

Upon first glance all the glitzy graphics and futuristic image transitions will impress/please the eye – see a screenshot of the SiteSeer welcome page eye candy (and I use that term loosely, unless you think web design peaked with Microsoft’s first iteration of the XBOX brand site back in 2001) below:

I have to hand it to the StomperNet folks, they truly know how to do create high value video/audio productions, but their collective ability to build a great SEO diagnostic tool needs much to be desired.

In comparison our SEOintelligence Homepage is simple and cleanly laid out:

Next step in the process is to check out the SiteSeer Tool input form. Here’s a screenshot:

Compare that to our SEOiQ Diagnostic Tool input form process to SiteSeer’s (they have almost identical inputs!) — see SEO isn’t that complicated :

Below are the (IMHO – lame) results from the SiteSeer diagnostic test series – long winded and very difficult to interpret (in comparison to the graphical and easy to understand SEOiQ Test ):

Now let’s compare the SEOiQ Diagnostic test results and accompanying SEOi Toolset’s highly prescriptive results – see below:

As you can see the SEOiQ results are not ‘buried’ in a ton of rhetorical SEO 101 copy/text, instead they are all displayed in easy to read charts for simple comparison and analysis…(covering onpage and off page topics including: site structure, social networks, readability and popular search engine index stats and many more) – some other SEO diagnostic tests simply “can’t handle the truth” – ehhh hemmm.

I respect the StomperNet Team – but a spade is a spade.

Sign up and take the SEOiQ vs SiteSeer Challenge – Try SEOintelligence Today – FREE 14 Day Trial - Over 99% of our Trial users become subscribers!

SphinnCon is coming to North Carolina on May 2, 2008. The event will take place at Kress Terrace in lovely Greensboro. From the event website:

The conference will invite attendees to submit presentations on subjects they’d like to talk about and also submit requests for presentations on matters of interest to them. This will loosely resemble a roundtable event, with regular Q&A through-out the day. Topics expected to be covered will include SEO, PPC, Social Media and Affiliate Marketing. Presentations can be intermediate or advanced level, white hat or black hat.

At only $150, the conference is quite a deal compared to many of the industry events out there, and provides a great opportunity to learn from the pros and network with other search industry professionals.

The only catch? There’s a limited amount of space (150 spots) — so if you want to attend, you should probably head over to the registration page and reserve your space today.

Why can these guys do it?
Well it’s simple – experience.

Jeremy Hermanns has been in the SEO/PPC space for almost 6 years. He once worked at a small company called Overture/Goto and was a PPC Keyword Category Analyst, he took that skill set and later became the Director of Search Engine Marketing for TribalDDB (a division of DDB-Omnicom). Jeremy has since worked with over 50+ Fortune 500 Top Search Engine Clientele. Having Managed over 250+ SEO/SEM clients in his career, Jeremy know what it takes to rank on difficult search terms and large complex hosting platforms. Jeremy has dedicated the past year of his life to developing SEOintelligence, and is determined to provide the BEST SEO Toolset available anywhere.

Kyle Bunch co-founded Blogebrity — the site dedicated to covering the exploits of blogging’s A-list — with Jeremy Hermanns in 2005. Since then, he’s served as Publisher and occasional Guest Editor, blogging about blogging with great aplomb while exploring new levels of meta. To balance the inherent geekiness of those two jobs, Bunch satiates his appetite for sports as Co-Editor and Publisher of TrojanWire and contributor at AOL’s USC FanHouse, writing about athletics at his alma mater, the Unversity of Southern California. Kyle is currently a Senior Producer at R/GA in New York City.