SEO - What is it?

SEO is the process of identifying the keyword phrases that potential customers are using with search engines via the Internet to find products and services, and ensuring that there are no obstacles for the website to capture the maximum possible volume of relevant, income producing traffic.

Organic traffic is the traffic derived from the natural search engine indexes and cannot be bought like through Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns such as Google's Adwords. How a website ranks is determined by complex algorithms that are applied (differently) with each Search Engine to an index of all the known pages on the web. The purpose of these algorithms is to provide Searchers with the most relevant pages for a particular search.

To achieve organic listing, as many pages of a site need to be indexed by the search engine as possible, and each page well optimised through words on the page (content), and meta content behind the page to match the criteria of the search.

All Search Engine algorithms currently employed, no matter how sophisticated and how many additional factors are taken into account, all come back to indexing the words used on pages. If a site doesn’t have one page that uses a specific word, it is virtually impossible for that site to rank organically for that phrase.

We measure success from targeted traffic and conversions. SEOs have traditionally measured success by tracking the rankings in the search engines for various keyword phrases. However, due to numerous factors such as personalized search, geo-targeted search and multiple search engine data centres, no two searches will show the same results.

In fact, it's common to do a Google search using a particular phrase in the morning, then perform the same search in the afternoon and see different results. Rankings are simply not a good measure of success. All the #1 rankings in the world won't mean a thing if a) you're the only one seeing those rankings b) you're ranked for keyword phrases nobody is searching on or c) the rankings bring Web site traffic, but not from people interested in what you are selling. The fact of the matter is that rankings do not help your bottom line. Today, SEO success is measured by how much targeted traffic is delivered, and more importantly how much of that traffic converts from visitors to buyers.