The basics of search engine optimization

By May 6, 2009 March 19th, 2015 Content Marketing, SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving website visibility to search engines. SEO is a complicated process with many different factors to consider. Basically, there are two types of SEO:

Organic SEO
Organic SEO involves optimizing your website for search engines so that when people do searches for your product, your website comes up on the left side of the page under search results. Ideally, your website should come up on the first page of searches for your product or service, preferably in the top three listings.

This was fairly easy to accomplish a few years ago, but now this is where everyone wants to be, making organic SEO more difficult to achieve. Depending on the type of product or service you are marketing and how competitive your industry is, organic SEO can run from a few hundred dollars a month to thousands of dollars a month.

If you have the budget and your product/service is conducive to selling on the Web, you should seriously consider an organic search engine optimization program. The first step is making sure your website is optimized for search engines and has a search-engine-friendly design. If not, you may want to consider revamping your site first to make it easier to accomplish organic SEO and improve your search results or implementing a paid SEO program.

Paid SEO
If you don’t have the budget for organic SEO and your website is not search-engine-friendly, you can still drive traffic to your site for a relatively small investment with Google Adwords. Google Adwords are links that come up on the right side of the page when you do a search. The process involves choosing the right keywords for your product and bidding for placement. The advantage of Google Adwords is you only pay if someone clicks through to your site. You can set a limit as to how much you are willing to spend per day, and Google only sends you that many clicks. This can cost as little as a few dollars a day and is a very affordable way to bring traffic to your site.