SEO - Search Engine Optimization

By Gary Bolton

Without a doubt one of the biggest things to hit the Internet today is the amount of SEO "Search Engine Optimization" sites popping up all over the place. Even "Web Hosts" are now advertising to SEO your site for a fixed fee who you might be hosted with. It really does seem to be the hottest internet craze and many people cashing in on the rush to create new forms of SEO software to sell!!!
So why is SEO so important?
Let's say you running a site about CARS and your trying to get new members to come and join. Your faced with a big problem, there are also hundreds if not thousands of other CAR sites out as well - all fighting to get new members. So any tool you can use to point new users to your site first by ranking it high in search engines like Google etc is a big plus factor for your sites future growth (even more so if your selling a product).
So what does SEO do to help me?
What SEO does in a nutshell is convert all your web or forum pages into much more user friendly links, which in turn can then be indexed by search engines much easier and faster. Which means they will get ranked higher along with many more pages listed.
The benefits of this are quite obvious: The more pages you have indexed in search engines, along with a higher rank. Means your going to bring many more users to your site. Which in turn can be converted into more members joining your site faster than if you didn't use SEO. Simple case of mathermatics.
Will it cost me money to SEO my site?
Well the short answer to this is: Yes and No.
There are many guides out there on the internet which can be found quite easy using Google as a search tool to find them, that will explain how you can SEO your site yourself "DIY". There are also paid products out there that can make this easy for you (designed for certain forum boards like "vBSEO" is for use with vBulletin forum boards).
Which route you take depends on your knowledge of being able to understand how it all works and make the code changes yourself accordingly. If your a novice, off course you can always just buy a product and make things easy for yourself.
Are there any disadvantages of using SEO?
The only thing you need to remember is that nothing last forever - other sites are also choosing to SEO there sites also just like you. And over time this will effect your ranking as more and more sites go the same SEO way. So while in the short term you might be impressed with the results. Over time as more sites get SEO'd, this will have an adverse effect on your site in general as there sites begin to take advantage of a higher rank with more pages listed in search engines.