Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Copy and Printing

As you probably know, the vast majority of our business at Docucopies.com comes from the Internet. Marketing on the Internet is... well, how much can we say about that? For a company whose veins and arteries are directly hooked to the world wide web, Internet marketing should generally be your biggest focus.

There are countless strategies, techniques and tools for marketing on the 'net, but in this entry I will focus on just one. Unlike most marketing strategies, it's completely free. Unfortunately, it's not an exact science, and many people don't have the time or patience to figure out exactly how it works (and these people tend to end up outsourcing this job to specialized firms). I'm talking, of course, about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

When you do a Google search, the first items to come up at the top of the page are your "Sponsored Links," which is just a fancy word for advertisements. These people pay to be there. But below the sponsored links is a list of 10 other entries, ranked by relevancy through a series of intricate algorithms, or mathematical formulas and equations, the search engines use to rank pages. These entries are referred to as the natural, or organic, search results, and most search engines display 10 on each page. (The pages that display these results are called SERPs - Search Engine Results Pages.)

No matter how much a business is willing to pay to get in the sponsored links, there is no replacement for ending up in the top position of the natural search. But how, when there are millions and millions of pages being returned for a search query, are you ever supposed to get your site ranked that high?

That's where those specialized firms come in -- the Search Engine Optimization "experts." (I use the term expert loosely because, quite simply, nobody knows anything for sure, and what they think they know is constantly changing.)

But before you rush out and pay some company $5,000 to optimize your site for you, there are a number of resources online, written by internet marketers and SEO professionals, that you can read for free to get an idea of how SEO can help you.

For beginners, I would recommend the following links:

A Rookie's Guide to Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing

(Of particular interest on this site is the link to "Top 10 SEO Factors")