SEO in a nutshell

We are not about to use big words and abbreviations - this article is intended to descibe just what on Earth is this thing called SEO.

"Sir, the CPC and CTR dropped for the PPC campaign and the site's not in the top 3 in the SERPs anymore, we need to use more agressive SEM strategies"

If the above sentence makes perfect sense, stop reading, you already know everything that follows.

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization and it is a combination of online marketing methods to boost a website's presence by improving its position on the results pages of search engines (better ranking), thus, driving more traffic to the website consequently generating more revenue for the website.

Rule number one: Never, ever, ever spend a dime to make your website rank better if the website has no ways of generating revenue.
If 5000 visitors come to your website every day and there is not a single ad to click on, not a single affiliate link and you are not selling anything then what's the point?
(in rare cases, on hobby websites, people don't care about revenue) If anything, put a few Google ads on the side. You will get a few bucks every day - better than a kick in the head.

Rule number two: Don't try to screw the search engines. Don't think "ah, it's just a silly computer script of some sort that pulls up search results from its massive database". Nope. These scripts are extremely sophisticated, fast and they are constantly looking at websites, one after another, at a rate no human can do (or even imagine). How many websites out there? Millions. Most get looked at by search engines every day. If they detect fraud they will blacklist you which means your domain will not rank at all for a long time. It's not worth the risk. And, there is a great deal of human control as well. A company like Google employs dozens of people who check out websites (the computer script marked suspicious) all day and assess their content. If a human flags a website "scam" it may be blacklisted forever.

Back to SEO. SEO companies first analyze the website and create a list of what's wrong with the site then come up with a plan to remedy the errors. In most cases this list is very long and includes items such as: writing new content, updating/optimizing headlines, titles, link texts, aquiring inbound links, tagging the website with anaytics codes so results can be measured and running various ad camapigns

A scary (and probably incomplete) long list of factors that determine search rankings

• What's the domain called. (a domain called gardening.com will rank better at gardening than another domain with the exact same content called cutelittlewaterlillies.com)
• The age of the domain - the longer it's been around, the better. Some companies don't take on SEO projects for domains less than 3 years old!
• The name of the file/page. (index.php is not as good as keywords.htm)
• The number of links pointing to and away from the website.
• The content (this is extremely important - the content must talk to humans but contain enough keywords for search engines, it's a very fine line)
• The frequency of updates (update frequently but not too often - weekly?)
• Headlines, subheadlines, bold, italic and regular text - headlines are deemed more important than subheadlines which are deemed more important than bold text, etc. Again, don't make everything a main headline. It will be flagged and then potentially blaklisted.
• Time - how longs has it been since the website is properly optimized. Weekend projects don't count in the eye of a search engine.
• Keywords - what are the words and phrases the website is "about"
• The density of keywords - how often keywords appear
• Keyword prominance - are the keywords more towards the top or bottom of the pages
• What other sites say about your website

I once spent, with 4 other people, 2 years optimizing a website at a total cost of about $300,000 and it was near the end of the second year when the site's rankings stopped fluctuating and it started to receive a steady flow of visitors every day (about 15,000 a day).

Keep these in mind before you decide that you are going to optimize your site after work from your home office.