Search Engine Optimization What is it anyways?

The Controversy of Search Engine Optimization Topic – Everyone is an expert. Yet everyone has their own way of optimizing sites for Search Engines. There must be thousands of articles floating around the net that touch on the subject of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The purpose of this article is simply to show in practice what does Search Engine Optimization mean.

Ah that The Geek Talk! What is the Search Engine Optimization?In plain English Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the process of manipulation of one website to attract more visitors by increasing ones site ranking on major search engines.
To better illustrate search engine optimization I’d like to resort to a practical exercise and you can try this yourself as well:

Exercise Description:

You are a proud owner of a brand-spanking new website www.fontsmadeeasy.com. Your goal is to drive as much traffic to that site as possible. Most obvious way is to get your site listed with the search engines and get as much free traffic as you can from that source. What do you do?

Step 1:

Submit your site to 3 major search engines.
Google.com (http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl)
Yahoo.com (http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request)
MSN.com (http://search.msn.co.in/docs/submit.aspx)

Note: A lot of time will go by in some cases it may take several weeks for these search engines to actually list your site. But for the sake of this exercise lets assume that It happens instantly.

Step 2:

With the use of Traffic Reporting software analyze the traffic you are receiving from these search engines. Note: If you don’t already have one you need to start tracking the traffic of your site. There are many different services and software you can use to track your sites traffic.

So here is a picture from the traffic reporting software:

This gives you the start. A baseline rather. It tells you under which keywords you are found on the search engines. Now you are ready to go to step 3

Step 3:

Figure out your site ranking for these specific keywords:
You can visit www.rankchecker.net to get the results shown on this step.

Step 4:

Comparative Analysis in Step four we compare the results from step 2 to the results in step 3.
So here is what we end up with:

Step 5:

Make a decision. As you can see now High rank does not always translate to high traffic. As it turns out not only do you need to worry about the rank but also you must consider which keywords are frequently used in your industry. In the case with fontsmadeeasy.com as it turns out you would need to concentrate on optimizing your site content for the keyword “dingbat fonts” why do you ask? Well its rather simple this keyword has a rank of 78 on Google yet it produces 8 visits. While “accent sf fonts” has a rank one and only produces 11 visits.

So what we just did is in fact Search Engine Optimization. It is important to note that this exercise is one of many different ways to Optimize your Search Engine Ranking and in now way implicated that this is the only way to do SEO.

About The Author
Steve Slavutskiy is co-founded MetaChecker.Net as well as RankChecker.net He has been researching and developing SEO strategies to achieve more prominent listings in search engine results since 1998.