In this day and age, the acronym SEO (i.e., Search Engine Optimization) is an oft-mentioned (if not abused) term. Defined by Wikipedia as “the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the ‘natural’ or un-paid (also called ‘organic’ or ‘algorithmic’) search results.”, SEO can be thought of as the aggregation of different measures, consisting of the mostly boring, repetitive, and monotonous tasks that one must undertake in order to slowly but surely bump up your website’s Google page rank(s). Many SEO ‘approaches’ have been developed, and icibpo, for one, is a proponent of the basic (and proven) 10-step approach, which can be described as follows:

1.] Initial Analysis - this ‘initial’ step sort of involves identifying goals/targets, planning around them, and, in general, laying the ground work for the succeeding steps.

2.] Keyword Research and Analysis à this is one of the most crucial step, as it may make or break your success in marketing with search engines. It sets the tone for your overall optimization efforts.

3.] Competitor Analysis - this is sort of like a ‘benchmarking with the competition’ step; if you know what your chief rivals are doing (or not doing), you might gain a slight advantage in terms of what measures to take (or where to go next) in your optimization efforts.

4.] Sitemap/RSS Feed Inclusion - in this step, we generate an XML Sitemap for Google and an easily-accessible RSS Feed for RSS subscribers.

5.] Search Engine + Directory Submission - here, we ‘submit’ our web pages to the major Search Engines (i.e., Yahoo, Google, MSN) and we take advantage of ‘Directory Submission’ services.

6.] Social Bookmarking - this step involves submitting a web site and the site’s contents to as many social networks that you can come across with.

7.] Blogs & Press Release Creation - Any serious SEO campaign should involve creating a WordPress blog, coupled with a PR (i.e., Press Release) burst, to build ‘steam’ or ‘traffic’ for a website.

8.] Article Submission - this involves not ‘populating’ your blog/site with Articles, but also submitting them to reputable Article Sites, or those with the highest PR.

9.] Link Popularity - ‘Link Popularity’ is sort of like a measure of the number of ‘quality’ incoming links from other sites. That is, the more ‘backlinks’ your site boasts from high-PR sites, the higher is your site’s ‘Link Popularity.

10.] SERP Report - SERP stands for ‘Search Engine Results Page’. Doing the SERP is sort of like doing a ‘Before & After’ study: we list down all your niche keywords and find out where are ‘ranking’ at the start of the SEO campaign, then after having done steps 1 through 9, you check your keyword rankings again to see if any progress have been made and what can be improved upon.

You have any doubts as to the effectivity of icibpo’s SEO methodology? Try typing “Iligan Computer Institute” (with or without the quotes) in Google and see where we’re at. Convinced? The ‘O’ in SEO stands for ‘Optimization’, and that’s where icibpo is good at!