Search engine optimization is a group of techniques for optimizing a website or web page, to improve its website ranking. Search engine optimization has become an integral part of any successful website, without search engine optimization a website has a poor chance of making good rankings. The term ranking here refers to the position of a website whenever a user searches for a particular keyword in any search engine, for example lets assume a website xyz.com sells spare parts for cars, search engine optimization would actually make the website appear on the first page of results for keywords like 'car parts'. Often effective search engine optimization can make sites like xyz.com come up as the first result that search engines like Google, Yahoo etc. show. However no SEO company can guarantee a top spot with any search engine, most search engine optimization firms do guarantee a first page listing.



What does a search engine optimizer do?

Basically a search engine optimizer first analyses the website to get a better idea of how the website is interacting within itself, additionally a search engine optimizer analyses the structure of the web pages that constitute the website. To actually explain every single technique that a search engine optimizer employs is not possible; however, to put it in simple words. A search engine optimizer will make changes in structure, content (if required) and also carry out effective link building, to optimize a site for better search engine performance.

What is link building?

Link building is the process of gathering incoming links to a website, Google and other search engines actually gauge the popularity of any website by analysing the number of incoming links that a site has. An incoming link is something like a vote from another website saying 'I know this site', the more incoming links a website has the more popular it is, and the higher the chances of the site getting a high ranking. Link building is basically an essential method for obtaining better organic search rankings.

What is organic ranking?

There are basically two methods to make a website popular with search engines, the first is to optimize the website and when a user types in a keyword the site is optimized for, the website shows up in the search results, this type of result is called an organic result and the search is called an organic search. However search engines actually have a faster but more expensive method of showing websites in their search results, search engines allow users to pay them to display text based advertisements that are relevant to the website, so basically if you don't want to spend on search engine optimization, you can actually go out and register your site to show up for paid adverts on search engines. However beware, the cost of running such an advertising campaign is far more than actually optimizing a site of organic search results.

What is website marketing? Is it different from search engine optimization?

Website marketing (as the name suggests), is marketing a website throughout the internet by various means, the term search engine marketing is often incorrectly confused with search engine optimization, search engine optimization is a part of website marketing. As such website marketing is a far more diverse topic than search engine optimization.

What techniques are involved in website marketing?

Website marketing is meant to increase the visibility of a website with not just search engines, unlike search engine optimization which involves just making a website more search engine friendly. Search engine optimization is just one of the techniques that web site marketing employs, website marketing techniques involve creating press releases, writing relevant articles, placing banner adverts with major websites etc. In addition website marketing involves buying links with websites, buying ads with search engines, and pretty much everything a regular marketing company would do to market a product. As such search engine marketing requires a greater amount of expertise when compared to search engine optimization, as there are various aspects involved in search engine marketing. SEM (search engine marketing) is usually employed by bigger and more organized websites.