SEO is one of those acronyms you’ve probably heard related to websites and internet marketing, but what exactly is it? Why is SEO important? And why would it benefit your business if you understand it?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and basically means optimizing websites so that they perform better in the search engines. Every time you search for a topic in a search engine, it searches its index and returns a list of relevant pages. These pages are ranked by importance and relevance in the hope that the first page or two presented will provide you with the information you need.
So, at its core, search engine optimization means setting up your web pages so that the search engines know exactly what the content is. But still, Why is SEO important?
It’s simple – there are millions and millions of websites out there and you need to do everything you can to make sure the search engines know exactly what your pages are about and include them in the list they return. It’s a known fact that people rarely look past the first page of results and are most likely to click on the top 3 sites, so you need to make sure your site is on that first page to even have a chance visited. It doesn’t matter how good your website looks, if you don’t do your website optimization right, you’ll never be found.
The trick is to understand what the main topic of each page is, and then think about what people would type in if they searched for that topic. These words become your keywords and act as guides for the search engines to point out what your page is about. Careful use of these keywords in the right amount and in the right places on the page helps search engines understand what the page is about and include them in the list of results it returns.
However, it’s not as easy as it sounds. It’s actually quite difficult to find the right balance. You need to use enough keywords to tell the search engines what your page is about, but you also need to make sure your text reads well because at the end of the day, people are visiting your site, not computers!
However, SEO goes beyond keywords and there are other ways you can improve your website’s SEO. One of the factors that the search engines use is the number of inbound links to your site – that’s where other people are linking to you. Both the amount of external links and the quality of the websites that place the links play a role in determining where your website will rank in the search engines. Article submission is another useful tool in the SEO armory, but knowing where to place articles is not that easy as not all article pages are equally useful. Blogging is a great way to improve your search engine optimization, both by using very focused keywords in your posts and by growing your site quickly. And while meta information isn’t that important to Google these days, making sure your meta tags match your keywords and page content is a worthwhile exercise.
Source by Ant Hodges
