The Rise and Importance of SEO

June 6, 2009 by Butterfly Filed under: SEO

The worse the economy seems to get, the more people are looking for ways to increase income, promote sales, and do it for the lowest cost possible. Simply put, companies don’t have the resources to start multi-million dollar advertising campaigns. This doesn’t reduce the need for advertising, but it seems to restrict what can be accomplished. Online, vast ad campaigns can be launched for pennies on the dollar, and reach a more targeted audience than a radio spot or a billboard location could ever do.

With the explosion of Web 2.0 applications, the Internet is going through it’s third, and most profitable boom. The first boom was the population explosion, where flocks of ordinary people discovered the power of worldwide communication. The second boom was the reckless growth of Internet businesses which follow that early usage explosion, seeking to cash in on unprotected territories with legitimate business and fraudulent schemes in equal measure. The second boom came to an end with the great dot com collapse right around the first of the new century. This third boom is being driven by professionals, enfolds traditional video, sound, and print into one package, and can be targeted to specific audiences, large and small.

More than any other method, Internet search engines, such as Yahoo and Google, are how people find things online. They type in a single word, or a group of words, and let the search engine sort out the choices for a website to go to. For buyers, this makes finding things easier, and for sellers it has ushered in a whole new kind of advertising, where the central competition is for a top spot in those searches. An entire industry has grown up around SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and SEM (Search Engine Marketing), and that industry is in the business of making website get to the top of the list.

The mathematics involved in determining how a website is rated by search engines is a complex formula that involves how well the site defines itself, how popular the site is, and even such things as how many links back to the site exist on other websites. And while the do-it-yourself businessman is still able to create their own websites if they understand HTML and CSS, ranking at the top is going to require each person to at least find out the basics, and understand the way the SEO can be used. The task is complex, and is best performed by professionals, but by finding a straight-forward and informative website to get quality information from, even a relative novice can apply SEO to their pages, and bring in more visitors.

There are many SEO blogs available, but many of those are driven by SEO companies whose main goal is to get your business, not teach you how to write SEO proven pages on your own. Find one or two that offer a wide range of search engine optimization strategies, and start experimenting with getting higher search results.