What is SEO?

SEO or search engine optimization is the art and science of improving a website’s visibility in the search engines in order to generate more traffic, more sales and improved return on investment with an online business. SEO requires time, effort and knowledge of link building and site structure and content attributes, and also requires a lot of energy and resources to get any job done.

For this reason, many prefer working with an SEO company rather than doing the search engine aspect of business on their own. It makes life a lot simpler to have an SEO getting the job done for you rather than going to all the trouble of doing everything by yourself when you already have tons of business responsibilities for yourself.

In terms of traffic, SEO is all about getting a gradual shift in the search engines until it becomes natural that your site attracts traffic from its own authority. This means that while SEO investments might not produce up front returns from building links and promoting a website, in the long run, the websites will create significant returns and residual income streams from SEO.

This is very different from other forms of advertising such as pay per click. Pay per click creates a fast surge of continuous traffic, but this traffic has to be paid for on each click, meaning the costs are usually higher than SEO and increase directly based on traffic. Long term PPC campaigns are less profitable than SEO, and so anyone looking to stay in business for a few years staying as profitable as possible is wise to look at SEO as a traffic source!