What is SEO?

As with anything, success in SEO requires a foundation of knowledge. In this article, we start with the basics by answering the question what is SEO?

The online world has dramatically changed the way business works in this country and the world. How is that for an understatement? Every business has evolved in one way or another because of the internet and some niches have simply disappeared entirely.

The most dominant reason for this change is the ability of individuals and businesses to go online and search for solutions to their needs. Whether it is finding a gift for Christmas or a financial planner, vast amounts of information are available at the click of a mouse. This information is, of course, accessed through search engines.

What are search engines? At their core, they are a huge pool of data that is processed using algorithms. The purpose of these algorithms is to search through the pool of data they have and find the most relevant sites for each search.

What is SEO? SEO is the process of positioning a site to make it as attractive as possible to these algorithms. This is accomplished by doing a host of things to the site including creating exclusive content, researching and identifying appropriate phrases being used by your target audience, and generating links from other sites to name only a few.

Many clients are under the initial impression the goal of SEO is to get the home page of the site ranked. This is only partially true. The pages of your site should be viewed as though they are a mall. Instead of just trying to get your target market to focus on one store, we want to get them to focus on all stores.

In the case of search engine optimization, this means we want to get as many pages as possible ranked for as many different keyword phrases as possible. For example, we will try to get this page ranked for the phrase “what is SEO?” while focusing on “SEO services” for the home page and “SEO packages” for the packages page and so on. The same approach should be taken with every site.

What is SEO? It is a method for getting a site ranked highly on Google, Yahoo and Bing among other sites in an effort to attract as much traffic as possible. Once on the site, this traffic will then convert into leads, sales or whatever your goal is for the site.

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