Introduction
Since the late 1990s, Internet marketing has taken off as a dynamic marketing channel because of its accuracy and how easily you can track traffic. The Internet has come a long way in a short time: As it grew, finding the sites you were looking for with a directory became impossible. Search engines appeared as the way forward, offering a way to bring the web to you. Savvy marketers began to realize any business that wanted to take advantage of the web needed to be on search engine results pages. Search engine optimization grew out of the need to develop pages in a way that tells search engines that your site offers the best content for a particular topic.
Search engine optimization isn’t a difficult discipline, but it is complex and has many different parts that you need to tweak and adjust so that they work in harmony. You aren’t chasing search engine algorithms. Instead, the goal of search engine optimization is simply to help you present your pages as the most relevant for a given search query. Resist the urge to assume that one part is more important than another. All the various aspects of SEO need to work together in order to succeed.
Throughout this book, we reference tools and other experts in the field. Search engine marketing (SEM), as an industry, is very active and excels at knowledge sharing. Although we cover the basics here, we strongly urge you to take advantage of the community that has developed since search engine marketing began. Truly, without the SEM community, we couldn’t have written this book.
We hope that you keep this book on hand, picking it up when you need to check for answers. For that reason, we attempt to make each minibook stand on its own. If something falls outside the scope of a particular minibook, we refer you to the correct chapter or minibook for more information.
Search engine optimization has grown and changed over the years, along with the search engines themselves, and it will continue to grow for years to come. Although we call this book an All-in-One guide, we have to stress that we designed it as a guide of the moment with an eye on the future.