by iakul

Created on: August 10, 2010

I'll tell you the truth right at the beginning. There isn't any advantage to a SEO compliant website. The reason is quite simple. There's no such thing as a SEO compliant website. A website is either Search Engine Optimised, chock full of invalid HTML and syntax errors, or in most cases, somewhere in between.Since the process itself isn't an exact science yet, no one's checking sites to see if they are "compliant" with standards. Plus, it's usually an ongoing process. There's almost always something you can do to improve the SEO of a site.

If however, what you really wanted to ask was " Why should I care about SEO for my website?", then read on.

SEO refers to the process by which sites make it easier for search engines to find them. Search engines don't "see" webpages the same way humans do, and even among two different search engines, the way they "see" webpages will differ. In fact, the same search engine will very likely change the way it "sees" sites over time.

While this sounds like it'll take a lot of work, it doesn't have to be done all at once for you to see an effect. Just like for human sight, where an object doesn't have to be either fully visible or totally hidden, a website doesn't have to be fully visible before search engines notice it.

Still sounds like too much work? On Google alone, there are more than 90 million searches per day. If you add in the other search engines, you have more than 200 million searches per day. With this massive amount of traffic, the real question would be why a site would want to miss out.

Some SEO techniques also bring some other benefits of their own. Take for example, backlinks. While having backlinks will help a webpage's search engine visibility and will in fact factor heavily into whether a search engine views a site as relevant, backlinks on their own also help to bring in traffic from the site the backlink originated from.

SEO also has a kind of snowballing effect. It's a granted that SEO will result in better results for search engine queries, which will bring in more traffic for your site. This increase in traffic, will in turn, get tracked by search engines, and prompt them to view your site as more relevant for search results. Which will result in even more traffic.

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