The Integrated Approach in SEM puts the optimization cycle first among the site management tasks. Only after you create and position quality Web copy will you then be able to pay attention to visitor analysis and technical maintenance.

In this course, we will refer to the aggregate of the optimization tasks as the "Promotion cycle". The current stage of our course is wholly devoted to taking you through these tasks step by step.

Search Engine Optimization is a part of Search Engine Marketing that aims at getting maximum quality traffic with the help of your organic search engine listings. Here's the definition we're most attached to:

Search Engine Optimization is the use of search engines to draw traffic to a web site. It is the technique of attaining a higher ranking in search engines and directories via changes to a site to make it more search engine compatible.

Often, the term "search engine" is misused to describe both directories and pure search engines. In fact, they are not the same thing; the difference lies in the way result listings are generated.

In fact, there are four major kinds of search engines you should know about. These are:

• crawler-based (traditional, common) engines;
• directories (mostly human-edited catalogs);
• hybrid engines ( META engines and those using other engines' results);
• pay-per-performance and paid inclusion engines.

1997 – 1999 were the early years of search engine era. SEO mainly consisted of submitting your sites to the search engines. These "voices from the past" are still heard today when this or that SEO company and / or automatic submitting software will claim to do search engine promotion for you by submitting your site to hundreds and thousands engines and directories. The search engines' indexing programs, called "robots" or "spiders", looked through all of the HTML code of a page and used some page ranking algorithms that they kept in secret.

Site maps are often ignored by webmasters, as well as its value for both visitor-targeted and spider-targeted optimization is underestimated.

What is a site map? In most general terms, it's a page or pages that contain a list of and link to all the other documents on your site. Theoretically, it's designed to give your visitors a quick way to find what they are looking for on your site without browsing the entire content. Site map also aims at eliminating the need to link to every page of your site from your home page.