SEO Success:
Fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization

A free ebook online reference to the basics of search engine optimization.
You don't have to spend a lot to be at the top!

Introduction to SEO

You have discovered that you need search engine optimization. Whether you are planning to perform the SEO yourself or hire someone else to take care of it, “SEO Success” will tell you what to do to your website to make search engines notice it and what you should know about SEO before hiring an SEO specialist. Prices for SEO services vary wildly as do quality and results. “SEO Success” will arm you with enough facts so you can tell a good service from a bad one and know what to ask about.

Perhaps you have already started shopping for an SEO service and people have been telling you about spiders and bots and crawling, and it seems like you’re being pitched a bad B movie. SEO can be quite daunting, but you’ve made it this far and things are going to get better.

And, if you are embarking on a campaign to SEO your website on your own, “SEO Success” is loaded with tips and techniques that will substantially improve your website’s performance with search engines. Please note that “SEO Success” presumes that you have at least basic knowledge of HTML. If you don’t, your webmaster certainly does and that person will understand the HTML tags discussed throughout this ebook.

I began researching how to optimize my websites about two years ago. I started my first commercial site in 2004 and quite naively thought that after submitting my URL to Google, I was officially on my way. Then, not too many days later, I went to Google and typed in a search for my company name: “Falbe Publishing.” That’s certainly not asking for much is it? No keywords. No product names. No subjects. No book titles. Just my company name.

I got nothing.

I typed “Falbe Publishing” into Google and didn’t get www.falbepublishing.com delivered to me. The sperm had not reached the egg at all.

Obviously at this point I was entirely unaware of search engine optimization or its abbreviation SEO. I did not even know that it can take time for a search engine to index your website. It can actually take weeks to get indexed if you perform zero SEO, but thankfully a few simple SEO techniques can substantially speed the indexing process.

So, like many obsessive entrepreneurs before me, I started digging. I learned that there are a lot of things that I can do myself when planning and constructing my web pages that very much enhance my visibility to search engines. However, there is no one magic bullet solution for making your website perfect. Appealing to search engines is about aggregate. You need a lot of little things combining to make a big picture of you for the search engines. Much of SEO is about checking off as many boxes as you can on the list of SEO techniques.

Building a website with SEO as a guiding principle is essential for all webmasters and internet business people. Your website needs to perform and get on the first page of results with the search engines as often as possible. SEO is a nice little potion that you simmer up to strengthen your website’s standing (eye of newt, tongue of frog, snip of baby hair…).

The demand for that magic website potion has made SEO big business. The industry claims to be the most cost-effective marketing service that an online business can buy. I’m sure in some cases that it is because SEO will get visitors to your site without you having to pay for advertising, which is always iffy. Every web business wants to appear on the coveted first page of search engine results for keywords relevant to what it is selling. Getting visitors to your website from search engines is called organic traffic. This means that it arose naturally from someone searching for a term or topic that matched up with your website at the search engine and the person clicked through to you.

Whether your organic traffic can replace advertising entirely depends on your business and competition, but it is always definitely worth getting. My websites regularly get visitors from Google.com, MSN.com, and Ask.com among others

Every commercial website needs to get organic traffic and by applying SEO techniques to the content, construction, and coding of your website, you will get the attention of search engines.