Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – A Primer – Introduction
September 27th, 2007 • Posted by Andrea Feucht • Permalink
Okay, so you're starting to read about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) everywhere, including on the SpaBoom Blog. You have a sense that it's important, but it's still very confusing. Worse, the information you read about SEO seems to be either conflicting or unhelpful.
What exactly is SEO and how can it help you? Let me suggest this definition for SEO:
When someone goes to Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL or the other search engines, and they want a spa or salon, they find and click to your website. Your website and online marketing practices should be tuned such that this opportunity is maximized – and more people see your business listed in those search results.
At the end of the day, people go to search engines to find the websites (and businesses) they desire and might not already know about. SEO involves everything that is necessary to get those people to go to your website.
There are many diverse opinions on SEO, and what makes this as much art as science, is the search engines themselves are constantly "fine tuning" the way they rank websites. They appear to do this for two primary reasons: first, to ostensibly provide better search results to their users and second, to prevent websites from "gaming the system."
Despite the varying opinions on SEO, there are some basic ground-rules. We are beginning a series of blog posts that will discuss how you can evaluate the effectiveness of your SEO, and give you practical suggestions on how you can improve your SEO. To not miss a thing, add our blog to your RSS feeder, or keep watching for new posts in the "Spa Search Engine Optimization (SEO)" category.
• Trackback • Posted in Spa Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Tutorials
Thanks Andrea, your blog is most welcomed and appreciated! In the past weeks, I have begun spending a lot of my spare time on my own elementary version of SEO. There are so many vitally important aspects and such a plethora of information about SEO out in the web, some good and some bad, like everything else. I have constantly found some of my most valuable information from links provided in previous SpaBoom posts, and greatly appreciate the help you have provided. I’m looking forward to your new posts, learning and watching my total hits and page rank go up and up. I personally would encourage others to follow your blog closely and put a little investment of time in learning at least a little about SEO. Our little site has gone from about a hundred hits a year ago, to almost 15,000! We aren’t even to our first anniversary with SpaBoom. Our massage clinic-spa is just about a year old, and we are located in a very competitive market in South Florida. At this point, a good 50% of our clients find us on the internet. Traditional advertising in our market is simply unaffordable and somewhat ineffective. I still have a long way to go. Google "Fort Lauderdale Massage" and I don't hit well at all. Google "massage Fort Lauderdale" and I hit on the first page of "Maps" and a link to my Citysearch ad, first on the second page. Google "Las Olas Massage" a popular area in which I am located… and I take at least 7 of the 10 spaces on the first page! Thanks again! And kudos!
PS: Feel free to visit http://www.PlanetMassage.com to watch our transformation over the next month or so. We will be adding a lot of targeted pages in hopes of gaining more traffic! We have learned enough to know we have a LOT more to learn, LOL.