Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. 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 engine.

SEO – Set it, don’t forget it.

In general, SEO is considered during the development and content creation stages of a web project.  It must also be considered when a web site is re-architected or when new content is deployed.  SEO is primarily concerned with titles, meta tags, html structure and markup as well as  content keyword/phrase density. In the definition above, you see that SEO is concerned with “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Since SEO is not concerned with “paid” inclusion in a search engine, the ‘climbing’ of the web site in the organic results can take time. Depending on the target search terms, this process may take days, weeks, months or years. In addition,  SEO requires some ongoing maintenance to ensure  search engine ranking is not lost due to improved SEO efforts by competitors or changing search usage (new vocabularies). Because of this time consuming natural process, and a need for period review, many site owners decide to include SEO  as part of an ongoing SEM marketing plan (and budget).