Search Engine Optimization is the set of best practices (both marketing and technical) that aim to improve the natural or organic search engine rankings of a given website.

Search engines are motivated by three basic elements: accessibility, relevance and usability.

The accessibility of a destination page or website defines the ease with which a search engine can index it and make a determination of where it fits within the grand scheme of things. Relevance and user experience of the destination determine how well the page aligns with the searchers’ expectations. After all, a poor user experience or irrelevant content will make a user doubt the veracity of the results that a search engine serves up.

Over time, this will erode the confidence of a user in the search engine. This scenario represents a potential death sentence to the search engine business model, which is based on repeated usage.

Search engines have two major functions: crawling and building an index with crawlers, which in turn provides users with a ranked list of the websites search engines have determined are the most relevant.

1. Crawling and Indexing the billions of documents, pages, files, news, videos, and media on the World Wide Web.
2. Providing Answers to user queries, most frequently through lists of relevant pages that they’ve retrieved and ranked for relevancy.

Unfortunately, none. WHAT!?

We’ll do our best to reach your goals but even Google has always stated, “No one can guarantee #1 rankings on Google.” Ask the right questions, do your homework and understand where money is being spent when choosing the right SEO service.

Organic Search

Organic search results are links that appear for free based on search engine algorithms.

• 83% online traffic from search engines comes from SEO
• SEO traffic has no media cost and can provide a substantial ROI – higher than most other channels.
• SEO traffic converts better due to the fact that rankings often convey trust from search engines.
• SEO has global reach and hyper localization that can bring in new and unexpected customers from all corners of the world.

Paid Search Ads

Paid search marketing are links that advertisers pay to list on different search engines which may appear on top, bottom or side of a search engine results page (SERP).

• 17% of the traffic from search engines comes from PPC.
• Spending can get out hand quickly with little return.
• PPC marketing can help quickly identify your best performing keywords, while implementing a longer-term SEO strategy.
• While SEO does require an upfront resource investment, search engine rankings, once earned, have long-term duration unlike PPC. Don’t pay, can’t play.

White Hat SEO techniques are strategies and techniques that adhere to search engine optimization best practice guidelines.

Black Hat SEO techniques are tactics to try to fool or game the search engines, and they are, at best, only able to provide a very short-term benefit with big risks over the medium to long term.