Think Before You Engage: 100 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Social Media Marketing Campaign

68. What Is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process to make a website or page more “readable” by search engines. The desired result of these efforts is for the website to appear at or near the top of search results in a search engine. The higher a website ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that the site will be visited by users. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results. Most people click somewhere on the first few pages of these results. Where a website ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward the site. SEO helps to improve the chances that the search engine can find a site.

The most widely used search engines are Google and Bing. Always include these sites in your optimization efforts by going to each search engine and submitting your site using their respective processes. As a key piece to most Internet marketing strategies, SEO helps to improve the visibility of a website on search engine sites such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, which can result in increased organic web traffic (see Figure 10-1).

SEO efforts typically start with submitting a website to search engines. Although search engines do crawl through most websites, submitting a website to the engine directories ...