SEO – What is it? How do you take advantage of it?

Type “What is SEO” into a Google search and Wikipedia kindly provides the following description: “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s ‘natural’ or un-paid (‘organic’) search results.” For many others, it is simply understood to be something that makes your website show up at the top of search engines’ search results. How it gets to the top of these search engines doesn’t matter – we just want it there. So how do we take advantage of it? Simply put, you follow the rules. There are millions of websites fighting for the top spot in search-engine results. Many SEO “experts” companies will sell you the pitch, “We’ll get your website to the top of Google search results!” The irony is that many of these “experts” can be found on page 12 of Google search results. Choose wisely when investing in a company to handle your SEO. Janet Thaeler from OrangeSoda offered up some tips and advice on what to look out for when hiring a SEO company to assist you in your efforts, most notably: “No one can guarantee a No. 1 ranking on Google.” According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land, a blog that covers everything search engines and search marketing, the buzzword “search engine optimization” came into use circa 1997. Since then it has continuously evolved and will continue to do so. What do you have to do? Stay updated with SEO trends. SEO has never had an overnight solution and quite frankly, never will. Sure using heading tags, Alt image tags, your title tag and backlinking will always play an important role in your SEO mission but not in the same way it did 10 years ago. For example, Google has recently announced that they are now taking Author Rank more seriously meaning that Google Authorship is now playing a larger role in your SEO efforts. SEO is a constantly evolving necessity and to take advantage of it, you have to stay up to date with constantly shifting SEO trends. Forbes has listed out the top seven SEO trends to follow in 2014. How many are you adhering to?