If you don’t know already, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is a very important part of your online presence and marketing strategy. Having a great website is only the first piece of the internet marketing puzzle. Once you have that great site, you need to promote your site to gain the greatest visibility that you can within the major search engines. Most people when searching the internet for products or services will not go past the 2nd page of their search engine results. Your website listing needs to be positioned within those first 2 pages of results, ideally on the first page. How do you achieve this? First, have a complete analysis of how your website currently ranks within the search engines. This is very important as the analysis will tell you where you stand against your completion and how well your keywords are working for you. Once you know where you stand and what your optimal keywords are, your SEO provider can supply you with a plan of action to improve your search engine visibility. How quickly your search results improve are a function of the amount of competition you have on the internet and the search terms used. The more websites offering the same products or services, the more work needs to be done to differentiate you from your competition.

SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or "organic" (un-paid) search results. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) target paid listings. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search results. This gives a website web presence and it gives you a major advantage over your competition!

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website may involve editing the content and HTML and associated coding on each and every page of the website to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of engines. This is often referred to as the on-page SEO optimization. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic. This is referred to as off-page SEO optimization and involves a significant amount of work by your SEO expert.

On-page methods: these methods use keywords in the title, meta tag descriptions, H1 tags, keyword rich body content and internal links. Another on-page method is to update the content on your site on a regular basis. This shows the search engines that you have dynamic content that is worth noting during the indexing process. Examples of this method are using blogs and regularly adding or updating content on your website.

Off-page methods: these methods involve submitting articles, submitting your URL, creating backlinks, placing relevant information on blog and forums, using mini sites and using reciprocal links on similar websites.

For the best results, contact a SEO company and let them do the heavy lifting of the SEO process. Don’t fall for the "get rich quick schemes"! SEO takes time and it takes work. Find the right company and budget for it and you will not be disappointed.