What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

The biggest misconception about web sites is that you can simply create a site and customers will then magically appear. Creating your site is just the beginning! Search Engine Optimization is optimizing your site so it can be found by the search engines when people enter keywords and keyword phrases.

A more formal definition of Search Engine Optimization (or SEO for short) is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high on the results page of the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN etc). The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a user's search, the greater chance that the site will be visited by a user. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engines.

For more information, please browse our links of informative SEO articles & sites:

Search Engine Articles

Bruce Clay – SEO RANKING Article

Search Engine Watch – SEO 101 Article

ISEdb – Search Engine Topics Articles

Search Engine Journal

Site owners are regularly contacted by scam companies, and it’s certainly understandable that many take the bait and start paying for “top results and submission to everything”. After all, who doesn’t want their site to be highly ranked.

HOWEVER, anyone promising “guaranteed top results”, “submission to 500 000 search engines and directories”, “instant results”, or “permanent top positions” is most likely a scammer. There is no way anyone can guarantee that your site is the number one result unless they actually control the search engine results, or if the top ranking is for a word or phrase that only exists on your site, of course.

The result of doing business with one of these "scam" companies can be detrimental to your business, resulting in having your site blocked by the search engines. Search engines have policies and guidelines set up for this very reason. Please do your research before hiring an SEO specialist to work on your Web Site.