Search engine optimisation is defined as an organic practice of improving the search engine ranking of your web page. A successful SEO will increase the traffic to your site in both quantity and quality using numerous tools and techniques for search engine optimisation to propel your website to the top of the rankings. SEO prevents your website from being lost in the doldrums of the Internet.

Every organisation, especially an e-business one, has an online marketing strategy in place. It is undeniable that SEO must feature within this plan, because even if a site is good and effective, people i.e. traffic must first get there for the experience. This leaves the marketing team with one important question: Who handles our SEO? Do we do it ourselves or do we hire a firm?

Important to any marketing budget is evaluating viability of the investment. An in-house SEO strategy means risking new strategies and techniques that professional firms undertake for tried-and-tested and probably overused SEO tricks. In-house SEO means that the web developers designing your site will perform the optimisation. Little experience will see them turning to the Internet for tricks, and with every trick fully exploited, it seems unintelligent to choose such a strategy.

With your page optimised, it's possible to think the SEO process over, but you'll be sadly mistaken. The process is organic and dynamic and what works today may not tomorrow. The strategy employed by an outsourced SEO firm is one which watches trends and changes in search engine behavior. After all, a firm dedicated to SEO must keep itself relevant to changes in its playing field. With hundreds of thousands of new web pages being added daily the scope for this means algorithmic evaluation, something esoteric to the industry and employed by a few.

Google may dominate the search engine landscape, but it isn't the only player out there. And search engines aren't the only targets - directory listings are as important. With multiple engines and directories, maintaining a permanent staff of in-house experts who track changes to all these is no mean feat. Submissions to these engines and directories also changes intermittently. With all these variables adding more complex dimensions to the process it is but prudent to employ a firm that specialises in search engine optimisation rather than an in-house development team.