What is SEO? How do I get my website on page 1 of google?

First E-Webstyle.com SEO Podcast Nov. 28 th 2008.  First page of Transcription

Chris: Alright welcome to the E-Webstyle SEO podcast. My name is Chris Burres. I’m sitting here with Paul Hanson. Paul, introduce yourself.

Paul: Welcome everybody. Thank you for joining the podcast. I’m the sales manager here at E-Webstyle, and we’re going to talk about SEO. Why… what is… are we going to talk about what is SEO or why SEO? Well, let’s introduce SEO.

Chris: Yeah, let’s talk about SEO first. My name is Chris Burres, I’m one of the owners of E-Webstyle. We’ve been in business since 2000. We started off designing websites and as anybody who designs websites knows, we quickly transitioned to also doing search engine optimization. It’s an incredibly valuable service that all of our customers want, so we provide it. That’s what we do. We’re in the business of providing solutions. The problem is how do we get great traffic? The solution is search engine optimization.

Paul: Alright, let’s talk, what is SEO? And we went to the most credible source in the history of mankind, also known as Wikipedia. I hope you know that I’m joking. Wikipedia says that Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website, from search engines via natural search results. What is that?

Chris: Can you can you… oh you want me to put.. I was going to ask you.

Paul: What is that… that’s the…. Anyone can read that off a piece of paper, but what exactly is that?

Chris: First off, are you implying that Wikipedia is not the greatest source known to mankind – cause I thought it was.

Paul: That’s the next podcast.

Chris: Oh, just cause everyone can write in it, so… oh, well, we’ll just go with that so…

Paul: My submissions the best; they’re always right.

Chris: So it is the process of improving the traffic, both quality and volume to your website. We talk about often natural or organic search engine placement. For those of you who aren’t familiar – organic and natural search engine placement is the area – and we’ll talk about Google almost all the time when we’re talking about search engine optimization because Google is such a dominant search engine in the market place. So, natural search engine placement on Google, anyone who’s visited Google knows that there’s sections off to the right and sometimes sections across the top that are called sponsored ads. We are not talking about sponsored ads when we are talking about natural search engine placement or organic. We are actually talking about those other results, and these are the results that end users typically assume to be more valuable, more relevant and actually more trustworthy. There’s some research out that that suggest that end users believe natural search engine placement is more trustworthy. So, hopefully, that’s a little breakdown of what you’ve read so far, and I guess you’re gonna…..

Paul: Yeah, that’s perfect. You’re basically talking about the middle results… the middle of the page. I know that’s where I usually click if I’m searching for something… for anything, I’m going to trust the results in the middle of the page, more than I will trust results on the……

Paul: The sponsor results are the paid results.

Chris: OK. I know what my preference is and I know when I do this. I was just going to ask you, Paul, do you ever use–click on the sponsored or the pay-per-click areas?

Paul: No.

Chris: No?

Paul: That’s just the way that I search. I don’t. OK, I have clicked in the–ever so often, I will.

Chris: Is there a pattern to that?

Paul: No. The reason I don’t is because I have clicked something in the paid results and it wasn’t what I was looking for. And that company decided to pay to place that ad there. And it may have been…

Chris: Foolishly.

Paul: Yeah, and it may have been somewhat related to what I was looking for, but most of the time it’s not related. And so, after… Relevance is what I’m looking for. And if it’s not relevant to what I’m looking for, I just said, “Hey, more often than not, the paid results weren’t what I’m looking for. I’m going to stop clicking there.”

Chris: Well, that’s a great lesson. So if you’re going to bother to do pay-per-click, understand that there are end users like Paul who, if you display your ad for something that’s not related to what the client, what the end user searched for and they click there, they may never click… They’re certainly not going to go to your site again. And they may never click the sponsored ads. So be careful because Google is trying to make money off of that. And if you’re showing things that aren’t related, then you’re ruining Google’s business. And Lord knows Google doesn’t have enough money, yet.

Paul: So, what’s involved? Before we do that…