It is a form of online marketing where the site and its content are made highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. It is a process of crafting a site's content so that the site gets high rankings in the various search engines (both the site and individual pages), and includes tailoring on-page text (such as headlines and subtitles) as well as choosing the proper keywords for a page's meta tags.

SEO Pricing

A variety of factors are involved in the pricing of any Search Engine Optimization campaign. You could pay a small price to get your site submitted to hundreds of engines, but this is more of a superficial marketing approach that infrequently returns surefire results.

Successful Search Engine Optimization requires a comprehensive, customized approach based on a site's unique characteristics. The Search Engine Optimization project will need to strike a true balance between website's design and functionality, the searching behaviors of the target audiences, and the algorithms used by search engines to find results.
A Search Engine Optimization campaign can start anywhere from USD 500 to USD 15,000 a year, whether in-house or outsourced.

SEO FAQs

What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization refers to techniques used to achieve high rankings in search results of search engines for keywords and phrases that are appropriate to a website's content and purpose.

Why should I get my website optimized when I have not generated anything out of its web presence yet?
Less then 2% of all Websites are properly coded for optimal Search Engine indexing. Yet, more than 90% of visitors arriving at a website do so from the search engines. If your site is NOT in the top of the major search engines or directories results, then each day you are losing thousands of potential customers. It’s about time you get that valuable investment bringing results.

"But our website went live months ago. It must be well known by now"
Try this test for yourself. Pretend to be one of your potential customers and try to find your product or service using one of the major search engines. Does your site get found? Are hundreds of your competitors listed before yours? Is your website listed way down the list?

There are a lot of companies out there that will submit my site to 1000 search engines for very little money. Why would I pay you to submit my site to 15-20 search engines?
95% of search engine traffic comes from these major 15-20 top engines. You are better off focusing on the engines that will yield the most results. Ranking well on these engines involves customizing pages to rank well for specific engines on specific phrases.

Why directory Optimization?
Directory optimization is the process of indexing to the categories best suited for your Website. The development of detailed and exacting descriptions that emphasize relevancy to a websites' content is extremely important. Addressing the requirements of the directory editors is the key to successful directory optimization. We will leverage the power of the directories in your favor for maximum success.

How long does it take to get listed on the search engines?
Some engines say they will list you within a couple of days or weeks, but realistically, a site embarking on search engine optimization and submission will start to see results is in about 2- 3 months. You can begin tracking results in a couple weeks after your first submission and then begin resubmitting again to trigger the engines to notice your site. The timeframe also depends on the competitive nature of your industry.

Doesn’t registering/submitting my website guarantee it will rank with the search engines?
Absolutely not. Rankings are largely dependent upon the website's pages being indexed by the search engines and way the pages are optimized.

How often should a website be submitted?
Submitting a website weekly or monthly serves no purpose and can adversely affect the web site. After the initial submission of a site it is only re-submitted for the following reasons: 1-The site's index counts drop, 2-The rankings fall, 3-There is substantial content changes to the pages.

How long before I see better rankings?
You will start seeing the search engine optimization results as early 7-10 business days after the upload of the "optimized web pages". But it takes about 2-3 months for all the major search engines to index your website.

My site was listed on a search engine last week, but now it's gone. What happened?
Periodically, some search engines will purge outdated URL information, and occasionally an active website will inadvertently be removed. Do not submit your site too frequently (more than once a day), because some search engines will consider this to be "spamming" and may delete your site from their listings. You also do not want to re-submit to a search engine if you already are ranked highly.

Is the home page only submitted to Search engines?
Any page you wish to be added in the search engines can be submitted and ranked for higher positioning.

Why can't I get my site in the top 20 search engine ranking? What is normally considered a success in Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization experts consider a page successfully optimized if it ranks in the Top 30 on at least one major search engine like Google.com

Why does my page rank 5th in one search engine and 9th in the other?
Each search engine uses its own rules to determine how relevant a page is to a given search query and these rules vary widely from one search engine to another.

Top Search Engines

Some of the top search engines are as follows:

Google
Yahoo
MSN
AOL
Ask Jeeves
allTheWeb.com
Looksmart
Alta Vista
ycos
HotBot

TOP Search Directories

Some of the top search directories are as follows:

Open Directory Project
Yahoo
Looksmart