Search Engine Optimization is the process of promoting your website to search engines. The better job you do of optimizing your site, the more likely you are to be listed at the top of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
SEO, SEM, SEID
Most SEOs (Search Engine Optimization Companies) have different styles or processes of optimization. The good ones employ “white hat” practices and are constantly updating their techniques. If you are planning on keeping the same URL (or website name like www.example.com) you would be well advised to stay away from any “black hat” practices. Tricking a search engine can be quite simple, and get great results. However, when you get caught, you will be penalized. Google has a blacklist, and you don’t want to be on it! Besides, you can still achieve great results by playing by the rules.
In order to understand good SEO, you should first know how a search engine works. Basically, there are three pieces of software that make up a search engine. The first piece is most commonly referred to as the crawler or spider software. The crawler software is an internet browser that locates your website and reads and captures all of the information contained there, including your content, your meta data, your media files, and your incoming and outgoing external links. The second piece of search engine software is referred to as the index. The indexing software takes all the information gathered by the crawlers and catalogs the data to determine your most significant keywords and how they relate to your meta tags, media, and inbound links. The third piece of software is the query. When you go to a search engine and type in a keyword or keyword phrase, the query software looks at the index and determines which websites have the most recent, relevant, and credible information that relates to your query. Good SEO’s use a combination of site structure, keyword rich content, back-links and a little “secret sauce” to get your site crawled frequently, indexed correctly, and highly ranked by search engines. Of course, the algorithms used by search engines are far more complicated than what can be explained on one page, but a basic understanding of how they work is a necessary component for good SEO.
The next thing you should know is that search engines are constantly updating the criteria used to determine your page rank and where you will be displayed on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). If you want your website to be consistently displayed on the top of the first SERP for your keyword phrases, you will need to make SEO a regular practice and keep up with the latest algorithms. Keep in mind that SEO is just a single component of good internet marketing and that simply having one website ranked on the first page of a search engine is just the beginning of e-commerce superstardom. Good SEO is not something that you should do just a once in a while.
SEID Program
