Introduction to Search Engine Optimization

Individuals and organizations across the globe rely heavily on internet. The benefits of a respectable Internet presence are immense and well-documented. What is less well-known is how easily nonprofit organizations can increase their visibility on the major search engines.  Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a list of web results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines. SEO is a process of optimizing the web pages in the search engine. It is a collected of rules and techniques in driving more traffic from the search engines.  It is a part of Internet Marketing and categorized into several types. Like SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing), SMM (Social Media Marketing), Affiliate Marketing, etc…

Of all the above SEO is the cost effective method of increasing the popularity of the webpage. It is the legal process of optimizing the web page. This is done using On-Page and Off-Page Optimization techniques. In other way we can say that we follow the Google search engine rules to optimize it in the Google search. Since the Google is the top Search Engine we concentrate on optimizing in the Google search engine. Google follows the strict rules in showing the SERP results (query search results).

There are two types of results which show up when a user performs a search in one of these engines: sponsored listings (for which there is a cost) and organic results. We will focus on achieving organic results. Organic results are links to sites that the search engine has dynamically, and seemingly magically, ranked as being most relevant to any particular keyword or phrase. Unlike sponsored listings, you are not charged by the search engine if someone clicks your link as the result of an organic search. The higher your website is on the list of organic search results for your keywords, the more visitors your site is likely to get.

Good SEO means you will reach more people, which is the primary goal of just about every website out there, whether it is a business, non-profit, personal blog or anything else.  Strong SEO means that you are maximizing your organic traffic – people who arrive at your website “naturally”, e.g. arriving via search engines or external links rather than getting there via advertising, email newsletter, or other web marketing techniques.  The better your SEO practices are, the higher your ranking in search engine results will be, and consequently you will receive a lot more organic traffic than you would otherwise.