If your market is finding your products or services using search engine’s like Google, Yahoo and Bing, search engine optimization services is probably already a line item in your marketing budget. It might be something you are handling in-house, or perhaps you have hired a search engine optimization firm.
However, if you:
- are unable to determine where your traffic, sales or leads are coming from –or–
- are not receiving any traffic, sales or leads from your website –or–
- are receiving traffic but it isn’t translating into leads or sales
you are probably interested in what Search Engine Optimization is and what it can do for your business.
Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services can be be best defined by first looking at an example of a Google search.
- The red box indicates Paid Advertisements or “Sponsored” results from the Google Adwords network. These advertisements are paid for when a searcher clicks on the ad. (A.K.A. Pay Per Click Advertising)
- The blue box indicates the ORGANIC (sometimes called natural or free) results. These results are driven by Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Organic SEO Services are made up of two components:
- On-Page Search Engine Optimization
- Off-Page Search Engine Optimization
On-Page Search Engine Optimization
Our job as Internet Marketers is to ensure that Google can categorize your site easily. In an effort to do that, professional search engine optimization agencies, like Terrakon, give Google (and the others) information about the subject matter of your website by optimizing:
- Title Tags
- Meta-Descriptions (to improve click-through rates)
- Body Copy
- Site Architecture
- Robots.txt files
- XML Sitemaps
and much more. The common characteristic of all of the above is that these are *on* your website.
Which brings us to the second half of Search Engine Optimization services.
Off-Page Search Engine Optimization
Our second job as Internet Marketers is to show Google that your site is popular with more than just your mother.
SEO firms, like Terrakon optimize your website’s popularity by:
- Submitting your website to manually edited directories
- Identifying opportunities for the business to gain links
- Creating listings in local directories such as Google Maps and Yahoo Local
and much more.
So there y0u have it — the definition of SEO.
Please let us know if you have any questions in the comments area of this blog post!
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