What is SEO

The letter combination SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is a collective name for different methods to optimize your homepage so it will rank better in the different search engines.

Why use SEO

It might seam unnecessary to use SEO or turn to an SEO-expert if you only have your own personalized homepage. But if you have any commercial interest in your webpage you really should consider it.

SEO might not be everything but it is a good complement to other online marketing such as online advertising. But watch out, all SEO is not good SEO. The SEO-community can roughly be divided in two groups the "White hats" and the so called "Black hats".

What is a White Hat

An example of good SEO (white hat) is if you for example have a homepage about dogs. Then an SEO-expert will analyze your webpage and the content to see what is needed to be done. Maybe you use the term "buy a dog" as a headline, you have the same <title> on every page, you do not use the h-tags for your headlines and so on.

Some of the things the expert might do are to change the headline "buy a dog" to "dogs for sale" which is a term that more people search for. Another thing is to put this headline in the <title> and use the h-tags for all the headlines.
(the phrase "dogs for sale" are searched about 25 times more then the phrase "buy a dog")

The SEO-expert will probably also help you trade links with other dog homepages and produce a site map for your homepage so the search engines can index your homepage easier.

This will probably result in a higher rank on more relevant search words and because of that generate more traffic and sales for your dog homepage.

What is a Black Hat

An example of bad SEO (black hat) is when the so called SEO-expert starts to use linkfarms, spamming, hidden text and so on. This will if you are lucky give great results in the short run. But if you are unlucky this will get you banned from some search engines such as Google.

This is because the Black Hat methods are designed to trick the search engines to return your page as a result even if it is not always relevant to the searchterm.