Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing, or making your site good for, natural search engine rankings. I use the term natural search engine rankings to simply differentiate SEO from the purchased, or sponsored search engine rankings.Search engine optimization is a fantastic way to improve the website ranking and rating over the internet.
Before optimizing a website there are certain things which need to be kept in mind as they might prove crucial afterwards. The SEO service provider should make some elementary evaluations, on the basis of which, they can make adequate strategies to improve the website status in search engines.
Professional SEO does a preliminary analysis of the website to examine the present status of the website in search engines and what is required to gain the top rankings. After doing an overall examination, a broad keyword research is taken into consideration.
Once, the process of analysis and examination is over, the SEO may decide upon other intricacies of the practices. Basically, there are two ways of performing SEO on the website; one is on-page optimization, and another is off-page optimization. Let us discuss them in brief:
On-page seo is primarily that portion of seo that is performed on the web page itself – hence on-page seo. On-page seo is the least important form of seo, although without it one would wonder if a web site should really be ranked at all. On-page seo is simply very elementary, and foundational.
On-page SEO
* Title-meta data creation
* Content Optimization/ Keyword Specific
* RSS Creation
* Image Optimization
* Blog Creation
Off-page seo is primarily that portion of seo that is performed outside the realm of the web page itself – primarily on other people’s web sites – hence the term off-page seo.
Off-page SEO
* Search engine submission
* Directory submission
* Article submission
* RSS Feeds submission
* Blogging
* Link Building
SEO skills can be developed easily and a lot of information is available online or one could just go to one of the SEO conferences and get the hang of it all. Small websites can be optimized in-house itself if there is the time and resources, or by outsourcing the optimization work to SEO professionals.
Though the number of techniques and tools for SEO keeps increasing there are some major skills that must be developed by anyone interested seriously in SEO. Leading SEO gurus do realize the importance of the fact that an effective SEO professional must be a person who can always see the big picture and need not be a specialist at only one thing. Here is the list of essential ethical SEO skills that may be mastered by the SEO professional:
* Link building skill
* Keyword analysis
* Copywriting
* Account management
* HTML skills
* On page SEO tactics like tagging/titling etc
* Marketing/sales strategies planning / SMO
* Web analytics
* Server side management
* Online public relation skills
* Awareness of all SEO tools/techniques
* Blog marketing
* Ability to research/search online
* Social SEO media
* SEO Questions
For the SEO professional it is also important to at least get to know about the various black hat SEO techniques but it is more important to make a conscious decision not to develop those skills as it is unethical and not fair game.
