SEO - What does it mean?
First, what SEO is not... It is not hokus pokus, it is not smoke and mirrors.
Search engine optimization is almost a science. It involoves a great many facets of website optimization, for which, most "web developers" are untrained and unskilled. There are on page factors as well as off page factors that influence the rank of your key words and phrases in the search engines. Finding the right balance between the two is where I draw the line between a "webmaster" and an experienced SEO specialist.
Search Engine Standards
Every search engine has it's own set of rules. The one rule they all play by is penalizing sites
that try to nanipulate the rankings by deceptive practices, also known as "black hat" methods.
Whatever you do with your site, whomever you have optimize your site, remember this:
if your site gets banned, the SEO "expert" doesn't suffer, you do. It's your site, don't risk getting banned by bad SEO.
Experience
There are a lot of "experts" who are happy to take your hard earned money whom have just set up shop with little to no experience. It's easy, all someone needs is a web page (like this one), a slick sales pitch and good follow up. What you want is proof. Plain and simple. I've been doing search engine optimization since 1996 when I opened my first e-commrece site selling antique traffic signals, parking meters and railroad signals to collectors around the world.
Where to go from here?
How serious are you about getting your site ranked in the top ten results for your most important key words and phrases? This is the question you must answer before moving forward. Why, you ask? Because search engine opitimization is not inexpensive and it's not an overnight sensation. It takes a lot of planning, a lot of work and a lot of fine tuning. Remember, your site is not the only one competing for the top spot. In some cases, your site could up against millions of pages. The good news is that most of those pages are not optimized in any way. Getting a top ten spot is achievable if your willing to invest the time and resources necessary to make it happen.
The big question is; how much is it worth to your and your business to be seen on the first page, at or near the top, in the organic results? In most cases, it's worth a lot more than you're going to spend to get there.
