This document provides an introduction to search engine optimization (SEO). It discusses how SEO works, how to get started with SEO, why businesses need SEO, and what SEO can do for businesses. It also provides definitions of common SEO terms and discusses factors like content, links, keywords, and crawling that search engines consider. The document recommends monitoring results and asking potential SEO providers questions about their experience, methods, reporting, and costs.

1. S a h ni
er E g e
c n
O t i tn
pmz i
i ao
O t i O le H wt
pmz nn – o o
i e i
Bi yuPg R n
ud or ae ak
l

2. SEO Buyers Guide
1. SEO Terms
2. Getting Started with SEO
3. Why You Need SEO
4. What SEO Can do for your Business
5. Questions to ask SEO companies
6. 10 Things to know about choosing SEO companies
Introduction to SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of implementing tactics and strategies that will increase your website’s
position in organic search results. More complex, a “search engine friendly” website is one that has been built on elements
appealing to the search engines including, but not limited to, quality content, generous and diverse external links, page rank,
optimized on-page HTML code like title tags, meta descriptions, 301 redirects, real canonical, etc. and in the end, a site that is
worthwhile to users.
Of course, the process itself isn’t as cut and dry as changing a few elements, and waiting for the search engines to notice.
Most of the search engines, and most importantly Google (ranked first in search engine use in America with a 64% market
share according to 2009 Nielsen ratings) use web crawlers to track potential growth in traffic, unique content, as well as a
multitude of other factors to position page rankings.
In the same sense that paid advertisements always show up at the top of search engine queries, having your website and any
services and products offered on it featured at the top of search engine results will essentially be organic advertising. Not only
will your website be the first site users will find when searching, those users could turn into continued visits (depending on your
site retention) and will keep your page at the top.
SEO is a way for businesses to promote their brand as well as increase exposure through online, industry specific content.
Optimizing for search engines – the most direct way for consumers to find you online – is a growing practice for established
businesses, as well as start-ups and entrepreneurs to meet the demands for instant access to information.

3. SEO Terms
Here are some of the more standard SEO and online marketing terms that you will come across during your research.
Terms Definition
SEO: Search engine optimization The art and science of publishing information and marketing
in a manner that helps search engines to determine if your
site is relevant to search queries.
SEO Copywriting Writing and formatting copy in a way that will help make the
documents appear relevant to a wide array of relevant search
queries.
Spam Search engines also like to outsource their relevancy issues
by calling low quality search results spam. Also junk mail.
Landing Page The page on which a visitor arrives after clicking on a link or
advertisement.
Link A citation from one web document to another web document
or another position in the same document.
Most major search engines consider links as a vote of trust.
Link Baiting The art of targeting, creating, and formatting information that
provokes the target audience to point high quality links at
your site. Many link baiting techniques are targeted at social
media and bloggers.
Link Building The process of building high quality linkage data that search
engines will evaluate to trust your website is authoritative,
relevant, and trustworthy.
Page Rank A logarithmic scale based on link equity which estimates the
importance of web documents.
Since Page Rank is widely bartered, Google's relevancy
algorithms had to move away from relying on Page Rank and
place more emphasis on trusted links via algorithms such as
Trust.
Google The world's leading search engine in terms of reach. Google
pioneered search by analyzing linkage data via Page Rank.
Home Page The main page on your website, which is largely responsible
for helping develop your brand and setting up the
navigational schemes that will be used to help users and
search engines navigate your website.
Spider (Web Crawler) Search engine crawlers which search or "spider" the web for
pages to include in the index.
Google Bot Google's search engine spider.
Google has a shared crawl cache between their various
spiders, including vertical search spiders and spiders
associated with ad targeting.
Fresh Content Content which is dynamic in nature and gives people a
reason to keep paying attention to your website.
Many SEOs talk up fresh content, but fresh content does not
generally mean re-editing old content. It more often refers to

4. creating new content.
Dynamic Content Content which changes over time or uses a dynamic
language (such as PHP) to help render the page.
In the past search engines were less aggressive at indexing
dynamic content than they currently are.
Editorial Link Search engines count links as votes of quality. They
primarily want to count editorial links that were earned over
links that were bought or bartered.
Using an algorithm similar to TrustRank, some search
engines may place more trust on well known sites with
strong editorial guidelines.
No-follow Attribute used to prevent a link from passing link authority.
Commonly used on sites with user generated content, like in
blog comments, to prevent spam and random links.
Age Some social networks or search systems may take site age,
page age, user account age, and related historical data into
account when determining how much to trust that person,
website, or document.
Analytics Software which allows you to track your page views, user
paths, and conversion statistics based upon interpreting your
log files or through including a JavaScript tracking code on
your site.
Meta Description The meta description tag is typically a sentence or two of
content which describes the content of the page.
Trust Rank Search relevancy algorithm which places additional
weighting on links from trusted websites (seeds) that are
controlled by major corporations, educational institutions, or
governmental institutions.
Keyword Research The process of discovering relevant keywords and keyword
phrases to focus your SEO and online marketing campaigns.
Search Engine A tool or device used to find relevant information. Search
engines consist of a spider, index, relevancy algorithms
and search results.

5. Getting Started With SEO
Search engine optimization started out very simple—you would submit your website to each search engine. After you did this,
“the various engines which would send a "spider" to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return
information found on the page to be indexed. The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it
on the search engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the
page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, and all links the
page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.” [Wikipedia]
A few years after this process got started (which was around the mid 90’s) website owners saw the great effects of having their
website come up on the first page of search engine queries. And this is how SEO got started, according to Danny Sullivan, an
industry expert; the term search engine optimization came around in 1997.
A year later Google was founded, and changed the game for search engine optimization by implementing an algorithm to
process which websites were relevant to each search query The algorithm wasn’t too complicated at the time, but Google
soon found that people were cracking their code, and more spam was being filed to the front page.
Now Google and other search engines are continuously changing their algorithm and monitoring what tactics SEO
organizations are using to keep their content relevant. By 2007 Google realized many companies where buying links to get
their PageRank up, so they decided to put a stop to it, and incorporated a nofollow tag. This will allow any website owner to
keep links in their site, but when tagged with a nofollow, they will not be counted when the search engine spiders crawl that
site.
With search engines becoming smarter to the SEO game, SEO organizations have implemented white hat and black hat
tactics to keep up. White hat tactics are “fair move” techniques that will not penalize your company in search rankings. Black
hat tactics on the other hand, are more deceptive, and can penalize your company by lowering your ranking, or not indexing
your website at all.
To get started with SEO, it is a good idea to first do a little research on your business website to see where you stand. Internet
browsers such as Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox both offer SEO specific analytics resources, such as SEO Quake.
Download SEO Quake for your browser (currently supported on Firefox and Google Chrome) and after the install, any
webpage you visit will show you its current page rank, as well as the last time it was cached and how old the page is. These
results are directly related to how high websites will rank on a search engine.

6. Studies in online marketing have shown that a large majority of web users never go past the first page of results after inputting
a search query, so increasing authority of your domain is the advertising equivalent to running commercials on prime time
television.
Real Time Factors
In 2009 Google and other search engines realized the need for real time search. With the advent of social media sites like
Twitter, Facebook, and blogs more and more people found they could find information as it was happening. A great example
of this was during the Haitian earthquake at the beginning of 2010. Even news stations like CNN were getting relevant
newsworthy information from Twitter.
Bing for example, has incorporated a Twitter real time search within their search engine. If you go to
http://www.bing.com/twitter, you can type in a search query and see real time results from tweets. The only problem with this
is not all tweets are relevant or have valuable information.
Google has realized this and come up with Google Caffeine. Although this feature is not fully live at the moment, rumored to
rd
be around 80% live (as of May 3 2010) it could change the SEO game. We don’t know how much since it is not live yet, but
having real time search could make things more exciting for SEO organizations.

7. Why You Need SEO
It's no secret that today's business world is being swept up by the ever-growing technological revolution. In order to stay ahead
of the curve, business owners are utilizing new avenues to find creative, yet effective ways to market their companies to
customers.
SEO is quickly becoming a major marketing tool for many businesses. Not only does SEO increase a business' visibility on the
Web, exposing them to thousands of potential customers each day, but it is also a much cheaper option when compared to
traditional forms of marketing, such as print/ direct mail, paid online advertising, and telemarketing. Having organic search
results that both rank high as well as feature important consumer information on a search engine query can establish both
trust in your brand as well as offer uncompromised advertising space.

8. What SEO can do for your Business
Among other things, an SEO service can:
- Rework your website so that it's more "search engine friendly"
- Determine which keywords should be optimized within your site
- Review your site's HTML code and make any necessary changes
- Edit and/or create copy on your site that will increase traffic and search engine rankings
- Stay abreast of any shifts in search engine algorithms that may affect how your site ranks
If your company does not have the resources to maintain a blog, and update with both dynamic as well as fresh content, an
SEO service can fill in the spaces where you need the most work. Many SEO companies also provide quality content writing –
an invaluable resource on the World Wide Web.
Gone are the days of content dumping and link hording, where information that was neither useful or consumer and industry
oriented populated websites for the sole purpose of link building and search engine results. Google, and all other successful
search websites such as Yahoo, have consistently updated their algorithms to deal explicitly with black hat and ineffective link
pages that provided duplicate, rehashed, and irrelevant content.
While early adopters of the web relied on consistently churning out information with an abundance of links, their content
crowded the web with useless keywords, rendering search query results ineffective for users. Dynamic and fresh content
consistently updated and consistently linked by root websites with trusted authority are what crawlers look for and help with
SEO.

9. Questions to Ask an SEO Company
Selecting an SEO provider is an important business decision. Here are some key questions to ask your potential SEO
company.
What kind of results have they achieved?
Most importantly, you should ask to see some of the results the SEO provider has achieved with past clients. Good companies
keep detailed records of past client performance and will share samples of their work with you as a reference (and proof that
they are skilled SEO professionals).
Have they worked with anyone in your industry?
An SEO provider who has experience is your industry is a huge plus. They will already know many of the keywords that are
popular with your target demographic, and have likely spent time studying the marketplace for potential opportunities.
What methods does the company use?
It is important to ask how, specifically, the SEO provider plans to get you improved results with the major search engines.
While the majority of SEO companies use ethical, above-board methodologies, there are some companies who still use
unpopular black hat methods to get results. Stay away from these companies! If Google or Yahoo! finds your site is not acting
in a compliant manner, you will be black-balled and lose any chance of seeing results from this, or any future program.
Are there writers on staff or will you have to supply the content?
Many SEO providers have copywriters and content development specialists on hand to write search-friendly copy and articles
for your site. This can be a major plus because writing the materials yourself can take a great deal of time and effort.
Do they provide reporting, and if so, how much does it cost?
One of the keys to a successful SEO program is monitoring results and making the changes necessary to continually improve
your standing with the search engines. Ask about the types of monthly reporting the SEO company provides, and what the
cost will be for such services. Many SEO providers will ask you to sign a contract, in which you agree to a certain number of
months of reporting services.

10. 10 Things to Know About Choosing an SEO Company
When implemented correctly, a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign can generate leads and sales for your website in
a targeted, cost-effective manner. Here are ten things you need to know about SEO that will get you to the top of the search
rankings in your area of choice.
1) Don't use images to display important copy
Displaying your text as a jpg, gif or other image may look fantastic, but it doesn't help you get results with search engines.
Make sure your best text is just that - text!
2) Describe images using the ALT tag
If you want to get the search engines to pay attention to your images, then describe them using clear and concise copy in the
ALT tag. This will point Google and Yahoo! towards your pictures AND your words.
3) Take advantage of the Title Bar!
The blue title bar at the top of your browser is one of the single most important places to put effective SEO copy. Use the Title
Tag to describe your business in keyword terms that will resonate with the search engines (and potential customers).
4) Make every page unique
Don't make the title and headline tags the same on every page. By making the copy specific to each page, you will help
searchers reach the pages that are most relevant to them.
5) Have an expert review your HTML code
The difference between success and failure in the world of SEO lies in the code that forms the basis of your site. Have an
expert review your site for common HTML mistakes or hidden HTML opportunities.
6) Keep everything on the up and up
Once you get black-balled by one of the major search engines, it is very difficult to regain your good name. Avoid SEO
providers who make outlandish promises and keep their methods in the dark.
7) Monitor your SEO program
Keep a close watch on how you're performing with the major search engines. If something isn't working to your satisfaction,
get in there and start making adjustments to the HTML code and the copy.
8) Increase your relevance with press releases

11. Writing great press releases and submitting them to online PR distribution services is cheap and a very effective way to boost
your search standings.
9) Write great copy and content
Great site content that features crucial keywords is still the best way to build your status with Google and Yahoo! Write well
and the results will follow.
10) Show some patience
It takes time to see results from your SEO implementation. Keep a watchful eye on the results, but give things a month or two
to take hold before making any changes to the program.