SEO Company

What Is An SEO Company, And What Do They Do?

An SEO company is a service which claims to offer increases in traffic, based purely on the friendliness of your site to the search engines, usually Google and Yahoo, which deliver the most traffic and offer the most webmaster friendly tools for targeting advertisements and traffic.

Two Forms of SEO

As with any Internet endeavour, nothing is as simple as it sounds. There are two basic areas of action for SEO, referred to as on-site, or on-page SEO, and off-page SEO, or off-page criteria. It isn’t clear which of these is more important, but many marketers are leaning toward the effectiveness of off-page criteria. The differences are mostly self-explanatory.

On-page SEO means that information in the mark-up language or content of a page creates additional traffic. This approach favours using keywords in text and tags to indicate to search engine "bots" or "spiders" that a given page has the best possible content for a given search term. Keywords are the most basic forms of on-page SEO, relying on the presence of either short or long combinations of words to draw readers who searched for that exact term. Keyword marketing depends on researching hundreds of individual keywords, establishing a relationship between users who happen to type in those words, and sales activity on pages that use those keywords.

Off-Page SEO

As search engines become better at their jobs (delivering desired content), they measure the actual behaviour of users who click on a given link. If a user clicks on a link, then immediately returns to the search engine, then it’s entirely possible that the page did not contain useful information. If the trends of user behaviour tend to indicate that a site is not useful, then it will be ranked lower (and receive lower Pr).

Linking: Off-page or On-page?

It’s no secret that some web pages link to more useful resources than others. This is where linking comes into play. If a page contains links from sites which are determined by the search engine to be useful (they have a high Pr), then the first page will also receive increases in PR, and therefore traffic. Linking can be considered off-page criteria, since the validity of a link is determined by the Page rank of the destination, and the text of the link itself may contain a keyword, also known as anchor-text.

These are the basic areas of change that SEO companies work with, and most balance the use of on-page and off-page changes in order to produce traffic. Keep in mind that many SEO organisations employ a variety of techniques, with the ultimate goal of delivering traffic. One SEO group may actually focus on establishing pages with high Pr in order to deliver traffic to your site, whilst others will seed high Pr pages with links to your site. In order to get the most bang for your buck, be sure to familiarise yourself with each of these principles. There's no substitute for speaking the SEO language, and grasping the basics gives most webmasters the upper hand when contracting SEO services.