This guide is designed to describe all areas of SEO - from
discovery of the terms and phrases that will generate traffic,
to making a site search engine friendly, to building the links
and marketing the unique value of the site/organization's
offerings.Why does my company/organization/website
need SEO?
 The
majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search
engines -
Yahoo!,
MSN,
Google &
AskJeeves
(although AOL gets nearly 10% of searches, their engine is
powered by Google's results). If your site cannot be found by
search engines or your content cannot be put into their
databases, you miss out on the incredible opportunities
available to websites provided via search - people who want what
you have visiting your site. Whether your site provides content,
services, products, or information, search engines are a primary
method of navigation for almost all Internet users.
Search queries, the words that users type into the search box
which contain terms and phrases best suited to your site, carry
extraordinary value. Experience has shown that search engine
traffic can make (or break) an organization's success. Targeted
visitors to a website can provide publicity, revenue, and
exposure like no other. Investing in SEO, whether through time
or finances, can have an exceptional rate of return.
Why can't the search engines figure out my site
without SEO help?
Search engines are always working towards improving their
technology to crawl the web more deeply and return increasingly
relevant results to users. However, there is and will always be
a limit to how search engines can operate. Whereas the right
moves can net you thousands of visitors and attention, the wrong
moves can hide or bury your site deep in the search results
where visibility is minimal. In addition to making content
available to search engines, SEO can also help boost rankings so
that content that has been found will be placed where searchers
will more readily see it. The online environment is becoming
increasingly competitive, and those companies who perform SEO
will have a decided advantage in visitors and customers.
How much of this article do I need to read?
If you are serious about improving search traffic and are
unfamiliar with SEO, I recommend reading this guide
front-to-back. There's a printable MS Word version for those
who'd prefer, and dozens of linked-to resources on other sites
and pages that are worthy of your attention. Although this guide
is long, I've attempted to remain faithful to Mr. Strunk's
famous quote:
"A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a
paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that
a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no
unnecessary parts."
Every section and topic in this report is critical to
understanding the best known and most effective practices of
search engine optimization.
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