What is SEO?

SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, is all about influencing your site’s rank in the various search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

No doubt SEO is a hot topic for anyone whom wants to build an online presence, and yet there’s a lot of confusion over what exactly SEO can do, and debate over how to best optimize a site for search engines.

SEO, and Quality Web Traffic

While SEO is important and can play a vital role in getting web traffic, it isn’t going to necessarily mean you do get the kind of visitors you really want; that is visitors which actually take their time to really look through your site, visitors that buy your products, and perhaps most importantly repeat visitors.

Build Your Website for People

While sites should be designed with SEO in mind, one should be careful not to focus on it too much, after all you aren’t building a site for search engines, you are building a site for people.

The nice thing is that building a website with a focus on your human visitors can really help SEO, after all the more people like your site, the more people will link to it, and search engines like it when people link to your website (assuming that said links aren’t “no follow” links).

The Importance of Synergy

No element of web-design is a truly isolated island, instead it is best to think of things in a more synergetic way with building up good web content, good design, and SEO all working together. If one element is ignored the whole can suffer.

It’s Not the Only Way to Get Web Traffic

It is also important to realize that while ranking high on Google or Yahoo is important, it is not the only way you can get visitors to your site. You should not forget good old word of mouth, and other forms of advertising, as well as of course the various social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter. All of those things can help increase your web traffic, and land you some truly valuable visitors.

One Site to Rule Them All…or er, Not

Again, SEO is about influencing search engine ranking, but is not about controlling it. Even if you do get the #1 spot on a search engine for a given keyword, there is no guarantee that you will hold onto it, you will always have competitors whom try, and sometimes succeed, in outdoing you.

Also the algorithms that search engines use to determine ranking are not set in stone,which means some change in how the search engine determines ranking can cause a once high ranking site to drop in ranking.
So no one can truly be “Master of the Googleverse”.