What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and is the process of adjusting and tweaking your website to make it more search engine friendly. For most sites search engines represent their largest source of traffic. Pay-per-click campaigns, on and off-line advertising and word-of-mouth can all lead to traffic, websites that are not optimized for search engines or missing in enormous opportunity to be found by the largest and most used websites in the world.
People use the Internet to find information about or to buy products and services, and search engines are the most commonly used tool to accomplish both of these goals. Optimizing your makes it easy for people to find the information they need about your products and services.

SEO’s Bad Rap

SEO has earned a bad reputation in the past, as firms figured out ways to trick search engines into getting desirable results. Search engines are run on computers, and to find information quickly and effectively they abide by certain rules. “Black hat” SEO companies have sometimes figured out ways to get an unethical advantage, leading to higher rankings. However, search engines are aggressive about discovering these tricks, adjusting their systems to remove such advantages penalizing firms and organizations that attempt to cheat.

Most SEO is Good
That said, most SEO companies and strategies are perfectly acceptable, and can benefit a site’s performance enormously. SEO is ultimately about creating a site that is easy for people to find, organized in a way that people can get the information they need to make informed decisions. It is not about manipulating search engines to get your site placed higher, but about creating content that is relevant, meaningful and specific to topics that your audience is looking for.

It’s not just about being pretty

As we’ve talked about in the past, a website is only as useful as the results it can generate for you. Whether results are measured in terms of sales, awareness of your services, or the building of a permission-based asset, all of these goals are more likely to be successful with a properly optimized site.