What is SEO?

One of the buzz-words of the latest 10 years in internet marketing is SEO. Everyone talks about SEO, everyone tries to apply it more or less successfully. If you are experienced in this theme you may skip the first chapters, otherwise read along to learn the very basics.

 

What is SEO

The term "SEO" is the abbreviation to "Search Engine Optimization". This is not about optimizing search engines, though. It is about optimizing websites for search engines. But why one needs to optimize a website? To answer this question we need to understand what a search engine is.

Search engines as the way to find an info on the web appeared in the middle of 90's. They crawled websites and indexed them in their own databases marking them as having one or another keyword in its content. Thus, when someone put some query in the searchbox of that search engine, it quickly searched its database and found which indexed pages corresponded to that query.

So, the more keywords of a query a website had, the higher it was shown in the results of a search. We don't know who was the first guy realized that he can make some changes to the pages of his website to make it rank higher, but he was truly a diamond!

So, SEO is something that helps your site rank better in search engines. There are a number of ways and methods of SEO, some of them are legitimate, while others are restricted and considered as "blackhat" techniques. Search engines don't like blackhat SEO and the effect of its usage may be disastrous for your website. Anyways, we'll thoroughly cover this material later in this SEO FAQ.

Do I need SEO?

Well, the answer "Yes" is the first thing that comes to mind, does it? But let's think a bit more. Does SEO help... well.. umm.. say some oil-extracting company to sell their product? Does it help to promote a small local grocery in the neighbourhood of your home owned by an old chinese? Does it help Obama to rule his bureaucrats? Well, I guess you've got the idea. SEO is effective mostly for Internet businesses. Do you have one? Then you need SEO. Otherwise, SEO is only one of the possible channels to spread the word out about your product or service. And not necessarily the best one.

Should I hire someone or make it all myself?

One of the most frequent unspoken questions is: should I hire a SEO professional or save few bucks and do it myself? There is no one universal answer for all situations, so here are some pros and cons:

	Pros	Cons
Hired SEO	You don't have to waste your time; You don't have to learn SEO yourself; SEO Pro's can be quite effective.	You still need to control a hired SEO yourself; SEOs usually don't give any guarantees and actually you must be very cautious while choosing a SEO to hire; Hired guy may be a SEO professional, but he is not necessarily a proffesional in your theme; Finally, you have to pay this guy.
Do it yourself	If you want it done right - do it yourself. You are the one who performs all the show, so you know best what is right and what is wrong about it; You really saving some bucks out there; You can constantly monitor the trends and apply changes in your SEO strategy on the fly.	You will need to spend some time reading SEO FAQs and tutorials like this one, posting stupid questions on forums and doing other things nubies always do. It doesn't kill, but still takes some time; You can get very little SEO benefits for all of your efforts and time spent. After all, you are not a guru, right?