What is Search Engine Optimization?

By Hugh Duffy

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic a web site receives from search engines.

While search engine optimization sounds simple and easy to do, it takes considerable planning, knowledge, work and takes time to deliver results. As more and more businesses employ search engine optimization into their internet marketing strategy, the more competitive it becomes.

Search engine optimization is mostly technical in nature, combining source code programming with business marketing, web site architecture, visual presentation, persuasion copy writing, and some other disciplines woven into the fabric of a website. Because of the work involved, virtually all web site developers do not factor search engine optimization into the construction of your website because it’s hard for the client to visibly see and would drive up the cost to develop the website.

Search engine optimization has been around since the mid-1990’s and was the primary responsibility of the webmaster back then. By the late 1990’s, web site owners started to realize the business potential and value of having their web sites ranked highly within the search engines and started to deploy tactics to manipulate rankings and game the system. To offset these “black hat” search engine optimization tactics and recapture control of which web sites received top rankings, the major search engines changed their algorithms and became more complex and proprietary. As well, the major search engines actually ban web sites from their search engine results that deploy overly aggressive SEO techniques. Today, Google says it ranks web sites using more than 200 criteria in their algorithm and continuously changes which factors matter.

Search engines have become a huge business and are always working towards improving their technology to crawl the web more deeply and deliver better results to users. However, there are limits to the how the web site is constructed, which programming languages they work with, and whether the search engine will index the web site. Whereas the right changes can deliver thousands of new visitors to your web site, the wrong moves can hide or bury your web site deep in the search results where visibility is minimal. That’s why your goal should be to have a “search engine friendly” website that makes it easy for the major search engines to index your website.

And as the internet has grown, SEO can be done for national searches, local searches, news, images, and industry-specific searches. Surprisingly, Google personalizes the searches to each end-user so the results are more relevant and deliver the proper context. In other words, the search for the term “cobra” might mean a snake to one person, a Ford Mustang to another, a brand of golf clubs, continuing health benefits to another, and brand of radar detectors to another. To deliver the proper context of the search term cobra, Google actually personalizes the search results for the user.

Hugh Duffy is the Chief Marketing Officer and Co-Founder of Build Your Firm, a practice development and marketing provider for accounting firms. They work with small and medium sized accounting firms and offer a free email newsletter. Visit www.buildyourfirm.com/ or call 888-999-9800.