In the land of search engines, if you don’t rank highly in Google and other popular search engines, your site will lag far behind your competitors in terms of visitors – and revenue. The measure of your online success largely depends on your ability to rank highly in the search engines.
So how do you achieve higher rankings?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your site to rank highly for natural search results. By selecting relevant keyword phrases and optimizing your website to rank for those phrases, you can improve your rankings. This process may involve keyword research, content and meta tag creation, link building and other factors.
Many campaigns also involve pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, which is the inclusion of sponsored links on Google. Because these listings are paid, they can appear on the first page of Google overnight. They are a nice complement to natural rankings, which may take several weeks or months to achieve first page rankings. Most Web users, however, place a greater emphasis on the non-paid results so it is optimal not to pursue this strategy on its own.
