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There are 4 key concepts to understand and evaluate search engine optimization out-sourced programs:

1. Ultimately, the value of your site's content will determine not only your accessibility through searching but also a visitor's the willingness to visit and obtain information from your site beyond the initial page found in a search.
2. As the basis of the accessibility and ranking of your site, keywords are the foundation of effective SEO techniques.
3. Search engines and directories have fundamentally different approaches to assisting people to find information. They share the objective of providing their users with the best possible user experience.
4. As in any effective marketing activity, SEO requires a programmatic infrastructure, a launch or start-up phase and then a series of trial and error iterations to refine and maintain the ranking or positioning initially achieved.

Quality content is everything

The following quote of Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer, says it all:

The guidelines are pretty simple: Stay away from hidden text, hidden links, cloaking, sneaky redirects, lots of duplicate content on different domains, and doorway pages. Webmasters should also stay away from programs that send automatic queries to Google. The worst thing you can do is try to cheat: Shortcuts to boost PageRank or rankings usually do more harm than good. Even if an SEO [search engine optimizer] does think he's found a shortcut, about two-thirds of the time it may be a sting operation. Don't bother with link exchanges, signing guest books, or other tricks -- the best use of a Webmaster's time is building good content -- and honestly promoting [his or her] site. When Google punishes spam like cloaking, we sometimes take out not only the cloaked domain but the SEO's client as well. Bruemmer 01

While the value of your site's content is a function of many things, the quality and appropriateness are 2 factors of over-riding importance. Both are dependent on your reading of your target market/audience's needs, requirements and preferences. In effect, your site's content is a proxy for your products and services so the best marketing in the world won't help you if your site doesn't satisfy your visitors' quest for useful information.

The bottom line is that effective SEO is built page by page upon the value of your content. In considering an SEO program, the first step is to determine the value of your content and whether it is more appropriate to improve it before or in the course of spending on its promotion. An effective SEO program addresses both.

The role of keywords

Your choice of keywords is crucial because these words and phrases will bring traffic to your site when users type them into a search query box. Careful selection of keywords used in web page copy goes a long way toward attracting traffic that can be converted to sales.

Search engines use keywords from a website page as the basis for determining the whether that page is relevant to a user's search query. The page's ranking is a function of the frequency of occurrence or density as well as its rank based on the number and importance of pages linked to them. "Importance" means the popularity and relevance of the links rather than merely the the number of them.

Let's consider how keywords play such an important role in searching.

Finally, searches are for pages — not sites. In other words, it is the keywords in a given page that determine whether a search will find them and their ranking amongst other pages in a given search report. The site — as a whole — is irrelevant and references to a site's ranking are in fact references to a given page. In the case of directories, the site is the listing although, in large sites, "site" may mean a distinct area within a larger site.

So you can see that the more common the keywords which describe your site's content (business, product, features, etc.), then the more work that will be necessary for you to be accessible through searching.

Search engines vs directories

What differentiates a search engine from a directory?

In The Search Engine Tutorial for Web Designers, the distinction is drawn as follows:

While both classes of systems have elements in common, such as the ability to search the data base, boolean expressions, and advanced features, the primary distinction lies in how the two systems obtain their data. One does it automatically (search engines) and the other does it manually (directories).

The important thing to understand is that search engines collect their page data and generate search reports in a largely automated way based on algorithms or sets of rules used to calculate the relevance and ranking of pages. Directories categorize sites according to a classification scheme in a largely manual (i.e., human) fashion.

SEO strategies and tactics flow from this crucial distinction.

While their approaches to compiling and processing metadata about pages on the web differ, search engines and directories share the same overall objective: providing their users with the best possible user experience in the search process. In other words, they take different routes to the same end.

SEO is programmatic marketing

As in any effective marketing program, SEO requires:

1. a programmatic approach; i.e., an ongoing systematic activity as opposed to a one off project which is not designed to be repeated or re-used;
2. an infrastructure consisting of the keywords and other metadata as well as landing, doorway and other specialized pages which users do not see but which are essential but not sufficient for search engine optimization of a site;
3. a launch or start-up during which manual submissions are made to search engines and directories and then followed up, adjusted, re-submitted and reported; and
4. a series of trial and error iterations to refine and maintain the ranking or positioning achieved initially because of the dynamic and evolving nature of the search process.

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