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What is SEO and Why Your Business Needs it - Part I

If you have a business website, perhaps you have heard about SEO. If not, here’s what Wikipedia has to tell about SEO – It is the “process of improving ranking in search engine results.” SEO is an internet marketing strategy that can help you to promote and market your website on the World Wide Web.

If you think back, say 10 or 20 years, you would have found businesses in those days primarily relied on print or television advertisements for letting people know about their existence. They would have spent hundreds or thousands of dollars to have advertisements created for magazines and phone books to get people interested in their offerings and converting such interests into sales.

However, with the advancement of technology and the expanse of the net, you can now tap into SEO strategies that can optimize your website by improving certain external and internal aspects in order to boost the traffic that your site receives. Remember - simply putting your site live on the web and adding your URL to your business card and letterhead is not enough in today’s world to drive the kind of traffic you want to. So, you will need to adhere to the active practice of SEO, which has evolved as the new way to advertise and promote your business on the web.

Internet Marketing
SEO is just one component of Internet Marketing and can include other forms of advertising such as:

  • Display Advertising – banner ads and other forms of paid advertising on other sites linking back to your site
  • Email Marketing – or eNewsletters are great at generating new leads and keeping in contact with current customers
  • Social Media Optimization (SMO) – involves social networking sites, social bookmarking, video, photo and RSS feed sharing sites, blog promotion.
  • Search Engine Marketing – promoting websites to increase their visibility in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
  • SEO – Search Engine Optimization includes On and Off Page Optimization that help search engines find you
  • PPC – Pay Per Click advertising is the most popular right now through Google Adwords and Facebook Ads. Essentially you pay a certain amount each time someone clicks on the ad that links back to your site.

Do I really need SEO?
If you are still debating about using SEO tactics, here are some facts that will help you to decide:

  • The bulk of web traffic is driven by search engines like Google, Bing and GoDuckGo.
  • If these search engines fail to list your site on their databases, you won’t be able to reach out to people who may become interested in your offerings.
  • Failure to use this incredible opportunity of reaching out to people irrespective of geographical or time zone boundaries will be equal to a huge loss of potential clientele.

In other words, whether your site provides products, services, content, or information, you need to ensure that the major search engine spiders are able to crawl your content and list the pages in their databases. Since these search engines act as the primary method of navigation for almost all web surfers, getting listed there, especially for some related search phrases would mean winning the half the battle. Wondering how to do it? Simple – the key lies in SEO strategies.

Continue reading: Part II: SEO Techniques in On and Off Page Optimization