I know Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not a big secret anymore and lots and lots of businesses, big and small, are utilizing SEO and SEM strategies to increase their visibility on the internet. However, the part of the world where I am from (Karachi, Pakistan), I still get blank looks when I tell people what I do for a living. So this is just a very, very basic write-up for those who can’t tell a meta tag from a burrito.

Very briefly, SEO is a bunch of activities that you can perform with the goal of increasing the overall visibility of your website, and in turn increasing the amount of targeted traffic that comes to your website. You might be thinking: “Hey, I have a killer website, with a killer design and a killer product, why do I need to SEO it?”

Well, granted you have the next best thing since sliced bread, but when you think about the world wide web and the number of sites that are becoming a part of it every single day, you might just get too overwhelmed to even think for a day or two. When you consider the stats, your website (and your product) is just ONE of the MILLIONS out there. So, the odds of your potential customers finding your website without any efforts on your part are pretty abysmal. But of course, there is hope.

People look for whatever they need to find on the internet through search engines (duh!) and if you are not in the top 10 results for your primary keywords, chances are you won’t get any visitors to your website (apart from your friends and acquaintances whom you might have “pushed,” subtly or otherwise, into visiting your site.)

So how do you get your site in the top 10 results? The answer is relentless SEO. There are several techniques that can be applied but they are mostly divided into two categories: on-page and off-page.

Like the names suggest, on-page optimization involves the things you do to your website in order to not only make it easier for search engine bots to crawl your site pages but also to make it appealing for your site visitors; and off-page optimization is basically “spreading the word” about your website and/or product all over the internet and getting other websites to link back to your site.

So there! Hopefully now you at least have a basic idea of what SEO is and what I do :o)

Tags: search engine optimization, SEO

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 7:51 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.