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What is SEO and how does it work?
by Marsha Maung
July 22nd, 2008
Mention the word SEO and people automatically assume that it’s a complicated and expensive process when, in actual fact, it is not. For those who are unfamiliar with the word SEO, it stands for search engine optimization. SEO is very different from search engine marketing because search engine marketing covers a wider range of methods than search engine optimization.
It is one of the simplest, most effective and affordable online marketing method available today. SEO is one of the first methods of promotion for most small to medium sized businesses and often begins when the company or SOHO starts promoting its website. Having a website, of course, is the foundation that needs to be laid down first…or the organization or company should, at least, have its own blog.
Working SEO magic into your website
Search engine optimization involves tweaking of your website. Not a lot of people focus on what’s actually underneath the layers of aesthetics of a website. A flashy website may create a good impression on the visitors but it does nothing for the search engines because of one very simple reason…the search engines see nothing. Absolutely nothing. That is why it’s hard to try to work SEO into a flash website unless it’s laid on top of a plain ole HTML web page.
What an SEO professional will look into when you employ him/her to work your website is to go into all the hidden ‘tags’ of each of your web pages. You don’t see these things when you draw the web pages up on the browser because they’re not meant to be seen.
These are the stuff that the ‘spiders’ of the search engines see, instead.
Keyword insertion into the tags of your pages
The old school thinking of inserting multiple keywords into the META tags of a web page is…well, old school. SEO has developed to the extent that it no longer works very well when you pluck all the known keywords you can think of and insert them into the web pages. There’s more to SEO than that. Every single keyword that you insert into the web page’s TAGS have to be related to one another, relate to other words or text on the page itself and the links coming in and going out of the web page is accounted for too.
Therefore, it’s no longer enough to just insert the keywords into the title tag, keyword tag and description tag. The same way using invisible text as a ploy is outdated, spamming the page with keywords is just going to get the website banned.
Should you do the SEO yourself?
By all means…but just bear in mind that it takes time and you’ll have to allow some time for this so that you can maneuver yourself around the learning curve. it is also a very slow process whereby you will make mistakes, learn from them, employ new ones, make endless changes and learning new ones all over again.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marsha Maung is an established freelance writer who has mastered the art of writing for the Internet. She is one of the first few Internet freelance writers who delivered original kick-ass copy. At the moment of publication, she's into freelance writing for blogs, articles for search engine marketing, ghost writing books, newsletters and other reading materials. She calls Selangor, Malaysia her home and enjoys playing in the park with her kids, Joshua and Jared. For more information, visit her website at http://www.marshamaung.com. Marsha actively and passionately contributes to http://www.contentmagician.com as well.