- SEs index and rank PAGES for relevance to a certain search term, not
web SITES. Your site structure can have a significant impact on the page
rankings but SEs do not look for SITES when trying to provide relevant
results for a search term. When you think about it, given that sites like
Amazon can have hundreds of thousands of pages, how would an SE determine
that the Amazon site was relevant to a specific search term? Right, it
couldn't ....
- SEs prosper, make money and beat their competition by providing FAST,
RELEVANT and TARGETED results in response to a user's search term (keyword
or keyphrase). For more detail on how they do this, check out our How
Search Engines Work page.
- User interest in a specific niche or topic determines how much traffic
is available through natural (organic) search. If only 10 people a day
search for information on "blue widgets", the maximum amount
of traffic you can get per day for that term is 10 unique visitors. If
your business' success is based on selling 10 "blue widgets" per
day over the internet, I'd rethink it, since visitor to sales conversions
for even targeted organic traffic rarely exceed low single digits.
- The key point here is that SEO DOES NOT manufacture traffic, it simply optimizes the page to capture a greater percentage of the AVAILABLE traffic. OK, so what is my definition of SEO?
- I practice a type of SEO I like to call "enduring SEO", since my goal when working for a client is to establish a permanent ranking improvement for the client's "money" pages.
- My definition of SEO is therefore any activity required to achieve a permanent ranking improvement to a client's pages and any follow on activities required to maintain that ranking. Note that the follow on activities are included since any ranking improvement can be undermined by Google algorithm changes or, more commonly, by competing web sites stepping up their SEO activites in order to improve their positioning.
Items like adding analytics to pages, split testing to improve conversions, Pay Per Click campaigns, etc, I view as being part of Search Engine Marketing and not strictly speaking SEO activities.
Talk to 10 SEO experts and you'll get eleven (or more) definitions of the term SEO.
In order to define Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you first need to
understand some things about the main Search Engines (SEs), Google, Yahoo
and MSN.
There are MANY other SEs, but these are the three that matter
at this point in terms of search traffic volumes.
If you are interested in understanding what things need to change on your site to attract more visitors, simply click on the button below to request a free site evaluation.
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