You will hear many people talking about it and arguing about the best methods. Cutting through the hype to learn at least the basics will help your overall business performance whether you take this task on yourself or hire an "expert" to do it for you.
Since traffic to your site and the squeeze pages you set up for specific campaigns is of the utmost importance in getting your message seen, you will have to delve into this mysterious world. The search engines, whether giants like Google or Yahoo, or smaller engines like Ask or Dogpile use a number of complex algorithms to determine how a site will place in their search engine results pages (SERP). The reason for SEO is so that when these programs combine all the information they gather about your site you will hopefully come out on the first or second page of the SERP.
Most people rely on the information found on the first few pages of the results to find what they are looking for and seldom go beyond that number of results before they have found what they were looking for. That is why you must optimize your pages. Without traffic to your site you will have no one to advertise to. Buying untargeted ads will waste your money whereas good SERP position will guarantee people who are looking for what you offer will find you first.
What do you need to optimize your pages? Well, many argue for this thing or that, but no one knows just what they search engines are looking for at any particular moment so you must cover all the bases. This means writing specific Meta tags for your pages that detail exactly what is to be found on the page. You must populate not only the Meta keywords in your tags but also in your page content. A 1.5% to 3% keyword saturation is the best target for these subject specific words. Make sure they are in the headers near the top and bottom and put them in your picture alt tags as well. Avoid frames as it is a rare search engine that can even see into them to know what is there.
Original content is another key to getting high SERP. If you have copy that is duplicated on a number of sites, the search engines will usually choose just one to index and merely cache the rest as "supplemental pages". These pages do not get the good traffic or rankings.
Inbound links to your site from other, similar websites will increase your SERP. It is important to build a network of links within the overall topic of your site and thus create a related neighborhood within your niche. Just having links will not work. An inbound link from an automobile related site linking to a site about animals will actually decrrease the link's value in the search engines ranking algorithms.
