Search Engine Optimization (SEO): What Is It And Why Bother?

If you have a web site for your business or are considering building such a web site then learning about search engine optimization (SEO) should be high on your priority list even if you only learn the basics. 

The time you spend learning about SEO will typically pay dividends many times over down the road.  The earlier you start, the sooner your site can begin reaping the rewards of your efforts. Even if you decide not to do-it-yourself and instead retain a professional SEO consultant to assist you, knowing the basics will help you get the most out of the dollars you spend with them.

What Is SEO?

According to Wikipedia:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the the visibility of a web site or web page in search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

By natural, un-paid, organic, or algorithmic search results they mean the portion of the search engine results page (SERP) shown here with a yellow background.

The portion of the SERP shown above with a blue background actually consists of paid ads and are not affected by SEO. 

You improve the visibility of a web site through SEO by improving the rankings of its web pages’ URLs in the yellow highlighted area of the SERPs for their targeted keyword phrase(s), preferably appearing on page 1 on the SERPs as close to position 1 as possible, if not at position 1.

Why Should You Care About SEO?

There are many ways to market your business online, and you should not limit your marketing strategy to just one method.  SEO is just another tool that you should include in your online marketing repertoire. 

SEO has an advantage over many other types of online marketing in that it generally continues to pay dividends long after you make your investment.  This is very different from advertising with pay-per-click (PPC) ads, cost-per-click (CPC) banner ads, cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) banner ads, etc.

With PPC ads (such as Google Adwords) and CPC banner ads, you pay for each click.  You typically have some budget that you are willing to spend for potential customers who click through to your site from your ads.  As more and more consumers click on your ads, they use up more and more of that budget.  Once your budget is exhausted, you have to:

1) fund the budget again so that the ads can continue to be shown or
2) stop advertising.

The same is true for CPM banner ads.  With CPM advertising, you buy impressions in multiples of a thousand from an ad-server network for a fixed cost-per-thousand.  The ad is repeatedly shown across the ad-server’s network of participating web sites.  Once your ad has been shown the number of times for which you have paid, they cease serving it up to their network of sites.  Again, at this point you have to either buy more ad impressions or stop advertising.

So PPC, CPC, and CPM advertising can bring instant traffic to your site, but you have to continue to pay if you want to continue to get traffic from those channels. Search engine optimization is quite different.

SEO generally takes more time to “ramp up” to where you are getting significant traffic from your efforts. However, once your URLs rank well for their targeted keyword phrases, there are no per-click or per-impression costs.  How often your organic listings are shown or clicked on in the SERPs is limited basically by the number of people searching for the URLs’ targeted keyword phrases.

More SEO To Come

Stay tuned for many more SEO-related posts here at WannaNetwork.com.  There will be a series of posts coming soon to help you learn SEO.  They will cover many aspects of on-page, on-site, and off-site search engine optimization.