The Big Picture

Often, search engine optimization (SEO) comes as an afterthought, and not everyone
is always fully aware of its long-term benefits. Depending on the situation, SEO may
involve both the IT and marketing departments. In a small business, just one (or very
few) individuals will be doing everything. Other times, companies will hire specialists
to help them with their SEO needs.

SEO can be defined as an aggregate of all the work necessary to produce a high volume
of referral hits from search engines, web directories, and other websites, with the ulti-
mate goal of making the website popular. SEO involves internal and external website
analysis, including link building, proper website architecture and development, com-
petitor analysis, keyword research, content development, and many other tasks.

SEO is partly about building appropriate content and partly about getting people to
link to you. Your content is essential, but Google’s ability to count incoming links, in
addition to content, was considered a major breakthrough.

Search engine marketing (SEM) refers to the utilization of pay-per-click (PPC) adver-
tising such as through Google AdWords. Although some elements are common to both
SEO and SEM, PPC advertising is much easier to implement and can achieve immediate
results, usually in the form of getting visitors to see your website in a matter of minutes.
Marketers will often ignore (or confuse) SEO in favor of (PPC) SEM, but by doing so
they are ignoring great opportunities. SEO is about as close to free as you can get. It
takes work, and work costs money, particularly if you hire a consultant. But you won’t
have any advertising bills coming in. SEO work brings long-term value.

If you operate your website for hobby or profit, SEO can be an important tool in making
your website popular. SEO is not rocket science (or anywhere close to it). But it certainly
can get as technical and detailed as you want to make it.

One could argue that the deceptive SEO practiced in its early days is long gone. Today
it takes a lot more effort for sites to be ranked well. Ranking well does not necessarily
translate   to   relative   site   popularity   or   sites   meeting   their   objectives   (desired





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