SEO – Search Engine Optimization – What is It?

The Online Marketing medium continues to evolve, but one buzzword has established itself as a stronghold in Search Marketing and this is SEO, Search Engine Optimization. So what is SEO?

SEO – search engine optimization, the technique of placing a website as a relevant source for search engines to reference for information.

As the search engines continue to evolve the complexity of turning your website into a search engine resource for information continues to get increasingly complex.

The following information establishes a sampling of the factors search engines use to measure whether a website is relevant to the search engine:

Meta-tags – the creation of information that is placed at the top of all web page back-end (area users do not see) documents to establish what a website is about and the keywords it should be established relevant for. Characteristics include title, keywords, description, and other references that do exist you can create in your tags – but are known not to have much weight as compared to the three mentioned above.

Images – pictures on your website speak an advanced language to web users as they speak to a user’s vision. These pictures currently cannot be read by the search engine blindly, but you the web page owner can make these pictures speak. The strategies to make pictures speak include proper file names to describe your picture and proper alt tags (alternative information to appear in case the picture does not load); an alt tag should be a brief two to five word description of what a particular website photo is.

Site Map – structure of your website and all the web pages that comprise your current website, this information helps the search engines guide their computers through your particular website and tell the search engine what information it may want to index.

Social Media – involves using platforms to create dynamic data for the search engines to find information about your website from what they may consider to be relevant resources. The most basic form of this media is creating a blog and this is becoming a large factor in search engine optimization success. A blog is the most basic form of website social media and allows for a website publisher or owner to write dynamic content to either point relevant information to their current website or to a relevant source of website information.

Website Address Relevance – when you are on a particular website and you click around onto various sections or pages you want to be sure the information describing your page is relevant to the information the user will find on each page of the website. If you need to re-name a corresponding page, the page being re-named for relevance should have a “301 re-direct” placed on it – this allows for the old page to be forwarded to the new home of the information.

In conclusion, Search Engine Optimization is a continuously evolving method to creating a website to be relevant to a search engine. Methods of Search Engine Optimization mentioned above are only a fraction of current methods being put into play, other methods are currently always arising in the marketplace and we make it our job to stay on top of the rapidly evolving Search Engine Optimization marketplace.