Title: SEO Benefits: What SEO Can Do For You Word Count: 564 Summary: SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a big thing nowadays for websites wanting to gain more popularity in search engine results pages. This is because it brings many benefits to website owners especially to those who are using the Internet to generate income. SEO can be seen as a marketing strategy since it can boost up potential income by attracting web surfers to visit a site and know more about it. The following are some of the paybacks that SEO can bring to website owne... Keywords: SEO, SEM, Search Engine Optimization Article Body: SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a big thing nowadays for websites wanting to gain more popularity in search engine results pages. This is because it brings many benefits to website owners especially to those who are using the Internet to generate income. SEO can be seen as a marketing strategy since it can boost up potential income by attracting web surfers to visit a site and know more about it. The following are some of the paybacks that SEO can bring to website owners. Increasing Internet Exposure If you want website to gain more traffic and become popular throughout the World Wide Web, you may want to join the tons of webmasters practicing SEO tactics. SEO is primarily all about gaining site popular by making its ranking go up in search results pages. The chances of attracting of visitors is rather high when successful SEO places your website within the top 10 or top 20 of the most popular search engine results on the Web such as Google, Yahoo!, and Live Search by Microsoft (formerly MSN). When users search for the information they need, they are most likely to notice and check the selections appearing on the first page of results. If your website ranks high, meaning it enjoys the most exposure, your site becomes more accessible to users, thus increasing traffic. Affordability Let us compare SEO with PPC or pay-per-click strategy. Both of them are techniques carried out to make a site more visible to the public. Purchasing advertising space, which charge per click, or using additional pay-per-click marketing schemes that are quite popular with others is an effective way to improve site popularity but in such cases, website owners do not gain much profit and sometimes, actually lose out. SEO, on the other hand, is a very reliable tactic that is as effective as PPC but it costs less and could gain more income. Actually, it could be a do-it-yourself job if one has the time to spend on learning SEO techniques. There are free materials and information on the web that could assist you in performing SEO tasks. Boosting Business Efforts If a website is being used to promote and sell products or services, SEO can help by improving a site’s availability to potential buyers and clients, thus the higher chances of selling more. One effective SEO approach for such sites is to provide information to users by writing articles that would best describe the site and the products or services it offers. For example, if a site is dedicated to selling cosmetics, it should contain useful information on the benefits that cosmetics could bring to users. This way users gain knowledge and interest on the product. When a user learns that a site is also useful in giving information on top of providing services and products, it is very likely that they would keep on visiting and recommend it to people they know. Your site may be used as a reference for social bookmarking If your website gains popularity, it could be socially booked by users. Social bookmarking is what Internet users do to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. In this system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share to others. The more your site is socially bookmarked, the higher the chances of it gaining popularity among web surfers.