What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation
SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the building, editing or expanding of web content or code in order to place a site higher in search engine results for specific terms, and thus increase the number of natural key visitors to the site. Search engines rank web pages in several ways based around the number of time the words that are searched for appear on a page, the way that they appear, the popularity of the site, the way it is linked to and the ease with which the engines can find this information. If by design your site is higher up the search results for the specific search terms that you want, then this obviously gives you a massive advantage in the battle to bringing the right customers to the site in high numbers.
White Hat. Black Hat.
There a number of ways to optimise your and these broadly fall into two categories. These are white hat, optimising the content you would have without taking SEO into consideration, and black hat, non-content related copy, coding and formatting used to trick search engines. White hat methods include working more key words and phrases into your copy or structuring your code in a way that make it easier to search. Black hat techniques are based around spamming key words into your site hidden in, amongst other things, meta tags, comment tags and irrelevant auto-generated content. The good news is that the algorithms used by the search engines and the spiders they use to index sites largely recognise black hat techniques and disadvantages sites for using them.
Complete online marketing
The fact remains that as with any product or service in any market, websites need a broad reaching marketing strategy that makes an impact in a number of ways. SEO and the search results and site hits it offers have to be just part of an online strategy that combines keywords with great copy, in-bound links with attractive content and internet coverage with the multitude of social and corporate ways people interact on the web. Higher organic search results are one thing, but the text used to bring those people to that site still needs to be engaging and the site well designed. There is no point bringing people to your product, if that product is not an excellent example of what they wanted. The number of different ways people use the internet need to be utilised. Also any number of other exciting ways to draw hits and encourage links are possible.
