Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization Services are a vital part of online marketing. As an Internet business owner, one of the most important things that you need to do is get people to surf through your site so that they see what you have to offer and, hopefully, buy your products or services. Since the most common way that Internet surfers use to look for the information on products or services is a search engine, then it is to your advantage to “convince” the search engine that your site is responsive to the needs of the searcher based on the keywords that he enters into it. To do this, you need to optimize your website, either by yourself or through a SEO Consultant who is equipped to provide your site with various search engine optimization services.

What search engine optimization services you will need will really depend on the needs of your website. There are several factors that you need to consider in determining your search engine optimization services requirements, including:

• Level of competition

If you are competing against a relatively small number of businesses, then your search engine optimization services requirements will not be so extensive. However, if your products or services are offered by hundreds of thousands of other Internet-based businesses, then you are going to have to avail of quite a number of search engine optimization services in order to rise above the crowd. This concept is nothing new; even in the brick-and-mortar world, the level of investment and intensity of advertising and promotions is dependent on how many businesses are competing in the marketplace.

• Keyword Popularity and Competition

Search engines operate on keywords, and search engine optimization services focus on these. Search engines utilize automated “spiderbots” that “crawl” through your site to get the keyword statistical data that is the main basis for evaluating its relevance viz. the said keywords. The higher the relevance of your website, the higher in the search engine’s list of keyword-responsive sites it will be. The intensity of search engine optimization services requirements will depend on the level of competition of that keywords that your website is aiming to rank for. For example, if your website is responsive to “book”, your search engine optimization services needs will obviously be more extensive than if your website was responsive to the keyword “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”.

• Actual utility of your website

If your website is a single product or service website, you will need a lot of search engine optimization services in order to drive as much of your addressable market to your site. Statistically speaking, your relative success rate will more or less remain the same and it will probably be low so the trick is to make it up in volume. For example, if your success rate also known as conversion rate is 5% and only 100 visitors go to your site, then you will probably only get 5 customers. If your break even target is 100 customers, then you will have to convince 2,000 people to visit your site. If, on the other hand, your website offers a variety of products and services, your success rate will probably be higher, which means you need less visitors which, in turn, means your search engine optimization services needs will be less.

What kinds of search engine optimization services are available? There are several, actually, but the most common ones are:

• Homepage optimization

This is one of the most common search engine optimization services available. In this service, the text of your homepage is embedded with the keywords that your website is responsive to. What’s more, the HTML program itself is embedded with keywords in the meta-tag portion, or that area in the program that contains remarks and does not appear in the homepage itself. It is always good to optimize your homepage because this is mostly what the search engine “spiderbot” “sees” when crawling through your website.

• Link popularity analysis

One strategy to optimize your website is to get the links to your site embedded in popular websites so that when visitors go to that site, they also get to see the links to yours and, hopefully, click on them. You can accomplish this in two ways: buy ad space in the popular websites or offer to exchange link space. Either way, you will need to analyze the popularity of the candidate popular website by via link popularity analysis, which is one of the search engine optimization services that SEO firms or individuals offer.

• Website promotion tools

As mentioned earlier, you can promote your site via links to popular websites which, incidentally, rank high in the search engines. These strategies are part of an SEO firm’s website promotion tools and form part and parcel of the search engine optimization services they provide.

The list of search engine optimization services that SEO companies provide changes over time. Remember that your website is not the only one that undergoes optimization, and that there is absolutely only one position for each of the Top 50 ranking for each search engine. Your website may be number one today, but as your competition avails of better search engine optimization services, you may be dislodged tomorrow, so you will always need to search for even better search engine optimization services to regain the top position. SEO companies and individuals themselves will also need to find ways and means to offer better search engine optimization services so that they can continue to justify their existence.

In selecting an SEO consultant, be sure to look at its clients and see how popular they are. It’s the best way for you to find out if their search engine optimization services are effective and if they are constantly improving them.

Before going into what a Search Engine Optimization firm does, let us first define what “search engine optimization” or SEO is. In “brick-and-mortar” terms, SEO may be compared to placing an advertisement in a medium that caters largely to a particular market segment, e.g., medical journals, fashion magazines, adult cable channels, etc. so that there is a high probability that whatever products or services you offer is what that particular viewing, reading, or listening market segment needs. The “agent” for this type of advertising is the advertising or marketing firm which, when related to cyberspace is the Search Engine Optimization firm.

SEO is the set of activities and strategies implemented (either by yourself or through a Search Engine Optimization firm) that influences a search engine’s “spiderbot” to give your website a high relevance rating which translates into a high ranking in the list of keyword relevant websites. Since it is a targeted approach, the success rate of an SEO strategy (measured in terms of average business per visitor also known as conversion rate) that a Search Engine Optimization firm implements should be higher than, say, online advertising (which may attract more visitors but will include a big share of “just looking” hits, thus resulting to a lower average business per visitor). This ultimately results to lower cost per sale since the resources required to service the visits (which will go down in terms of quantity but increase in terms of quality) goes down.

What does a Search Engine Optimization firm do in order to achieve its objective of ethically optimizing your website? One Search Engine Optimization firm may apply a different set of SEO strategies versus another Search Engine Optimization firm, but they both focus on one aspect: the search engine keyword or keywords. Essentially, the keyword is the major rating criterion of a relevance rating; i.e., how often it appears in the website or content. Although more sophisticated discernment algorithms are being implemented by the search engine’s “spiderbot” to weed out unethical practices (e.g., embedding keywords in articles or content that do not have any logical connection), the keyword density still the key.

Some of the strategies that a Search Engine Optimization firm employs are as follows:

• Keyword Rich Domain Names

This is the most “no brainer” strategy that a Search Engine Optimization firm could employ, yet is one of the most difficult to implement. The proposition of this strategy is that the best way to get a high ranking for a keyword relevant site is to embed the keyword into the domain name. For example, www.recipes.com will obviously get top ranking when the keyword “recipes” is used in the search box (as a side note, if you are looking for recipes, you might even just skip the search engine altogether and instinctively enter www.recipes.com). The problem with this strategy, of course, is that these domain names are probably owned by someone else already, in which case, the Search Engine Optimization firm could embed the keyword in a longer domain name like, e.g., www.mothers-recipes.com or www.home-cooked-meal-recipes.com, which, when combined with other SEO strategies could potentially even outrank www.recipes.com.

• Content Optimization

In this strategy, the Search Engine Optimization firm ensures that the content is ethically filled with all the relevant keywords to which the website is responsive to. This is accomplished by framing the advertising copy around the keyword and making it appear as many times as relevancy allows, including the keywords in the text articles, etc. The Search Engine Optimization firm has several ways of determining the possible relevance rank of your website based on the level of content optimization.

• Meta-Tag Optimization

All websites use HTML in several parts of the website’s program. In the body of the HTML program are areas that the programmer uses, among other things, for remarks (e.g., to remind him what the code is all about). The content of these areas (called meta-tags) do not have an impact on how the website looks but is “crawled through” by the search engine’s “spiderbot” all the same. Because these meta-tags play a factor in the website’s relevance, a Search Engine Optimization firm will normally embed as many keywords as ethically allowed to into them.

In selecting the Search Engine Optimization firm that you will use to optimize your website, be sure to put a heavy premium on its experience and reputation. Also, avoid a Search Engine Optimization firm that engages in unethical (and illegal) practices just to increase the number of visitors to your sites. Avoid a Search Engine Optimization firm that is vague about how it is going to optimize your website. If it has nothing to hide, then it should be transparent as to what it is supposed to do. If you heard about a Search Engine Optimization firm through spam mail, do not even consider it. If the Search Engine Optimization firm charges you a low price without any clear specifics as to what it will do, walk away. Finally, make sure to canvass your requirements before selecting the Search Engine Optimization firm you will use.