Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of positioning your website or landing page to appear in the natural search results for searches related to your product or business. This is both an incredibly difficult, and inestimably valuable skill to master.According to SEMPO, over 75% of all search traffic comes from the natural, organic results. Interestingly, over 85% of the world’s SEM budget is spent on pay per click (PPC marketing). There is a very good reason for this – SEO is muchmore difficult to get right than PPC.How can this be? The difficulty and mystery surrounding SEO stems from the fact that none of the search engines will directly reveal exactly how they rank pages. Most of the SEO crowd is left with theories, experiments, and pieces of the puzzle that they know usually work, but the complete picture remains somewhat of a secret.

If you think that’s bad, get a load of this – Even if you could get your hands on Google’s exact page rank formula, it wouldn’t even matter at all. As baffling of a realization as that is, it is verifiably true, because Google does not rank pages based on a set of strict criteria anymore – it ranks them based on the elements of their competitors.

This is to say that there exists no list of perfect elements that any website, in any industry, of any size can implement and instantly rank number 1. Instead Google now takes into account a variety of specific factors and compares everyone in your industry who is competing for the same keywords against each other to determine rank.

Some of these elements are:

• Inbound Links: How many relevant websites are linking to your page?

• Anchor Text Of Inbound Links: What is the link anchor text on other websites linking to you? Is that text relevant?

• Title Tag Keyword Count: Is your keyword in your website title tag?

• URL Canonicalization: If your domain’s URL is not properly configured, you can lose a great deal of inbound link authority.

• Keyword Density: How many times does the keyword appear on your page? Too many or too few compared to your competitors is a problem.

• Natural Sounding Language: Search engines now implement natural language processing technology to scan your website and check if the content makes sense, sounds natural, or appears forced.

• Proper HTML Formatting: Search engines will punish your website with a lower rank if it finds any errors in the formatting of your HTML.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are a myriad of other important factors that the engines examine, but the important thing to keep in mind is that you cannot simply improve these elements on your page and forget about it, because it isn’t just your page that’s examined…

Your site is constantly being compared against every other website in the search results, forcing you into an ongoing war for position with every one of your competitors.

Though this is a scary thought, it is actually your biggest point of strength. Most companies are too busy chasing the Google PageRank formula, erroneously believing that if they can just find the “winning formula,” they will stay at number one forever.

These companies are living in the past. By embracing the reality of SEO, you can generate an analysis of your entire search landscape and begin effectively overtaking your competitors one by one as you climb the ladder to the top the right way.

Excedra has access to proprietary competitive analysis tools that reveal your competition’s weakest points and determine opportunities for surpassing them in the results. We have the expertise and technology to lay out a literal battle plan with specific moves and strategies that will place you miles beyond competing websites.

Get a free web marketing evaluation for your business today. Excedra can help you dominate the search results with ppc management or natural search optimization.