Why SEO?
Irrespective of whether your business caters to the localized or global target audience, nowadays majority of website traffic is directed through the search engines. Needless to say that people are increasingly using internet as a medium to search for their specific needs for products, services, activities and collaboration. Scaling up of your business, whether online or offline is significantly dependent on how well your business ranks in the internet search results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help in boosting the ranking of your website. However, what need to be clearly understood is that while SEO can be achieved by following simple best practices, it can have severe adverse impact if the concepts and functioning of search engines are not well understood or attempts for manipulations are made.

Search Engines Are Too Smart…
Search engines are extremely intelligent and their creators have thought about data analysis like none of us. So forget about manipulating information for search engines. Create a site for users and not for search engines.

Most commonly used search engines like Google and Yahoo consider over 200 factors in determining the relevance of the search results. In a long term it will essentially be the richness of the content that can sustain or improve the search ranking. Ranking will indirectly be determined on how relevant the web users find your site.

What To Expect From SEO?
SEO helps on primarily two counts, first, it facilitates better crawling on the site, and second, it reorganizes the content to increase the relevance of various pages, as the actual users of the sites would perceive it. SEO does not guarantee a search ranking but it enables better collaboration between the site and the search engines.

Don’t Try To Fool A Search Engine
Contemporary search engines are smart enough to detect and negate most kinds of manipulation attempts. Most search engines started disregarding Meta tags long time back to avoid their abuse. Trying to get hundreds of cross links using link farms can get your site banned from the search rankings. That’s what happened to a US based company, Traffic Power, and all its clients. Cloaking, i.e. showing different web pages to the human users and search engines, will be more of a misadventure, if tried. Sites like BMW, Germany, and Ricoh, Germany, were banned from the search results for this in February 2006.