Search Engine Optimization How To

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is an important factor in driving traffic to your website. This how to will provide you with some basic types to get started. What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization is the process of taking steps to making your website as visible as possible to the major search engines. You want organic traffic to your website, it is by far the most useful traffic you can receive. The reason being is that when you receive traffic from the search engines it is usually highly targeted traffic. Let's say that you have a website where you sell dog toys. Your goal is to get natural traffic from the search engines for people searching for just that. You then have visitors coming to your site looking for exactly what you are providing. This leads to more sales. So what are some steps you can take to improve your websites rankings in the search engines?

You want to target keywords in the content that you have on your website. It's important to look for keywords that aren't so competitve so you have a good chance to rank for them. So let's use the example where you have a website and you sell dog toys. Building your website around the keyword dogs is not a very good idea if you are just beginning, you want to target a keyword that is less competitive. What I would do is bid on terms like dog toys for black labs, or dog toys for german shepherds. These are less competitve terms and you can rank more easily for them and begin getting natural traffic. What you want to do is write content with the keywords you are targeting in the title. Say you want to write an article about dog toys for black labs, you could write an article titled, 'The Best Dog Toys For Black Lack Labs'. You can see that the keyword we selected is within the title of the article. This is very important to put the keyword you want to target in the post title. You also want to use the keywords a couple times within the paragraph of the actual article. You don't want to use the keyword too many times else Google will think that you are keyword stuffing your pages in order to manipulate the search engines. I usually mention my keyword three to four times in the article.

You also want to use a good META tag description of your website. People argue how important this is in regards to SEO, but I find it more of a selling point to people searching for your website. This description show's up when people search for your term and your site is listed. A small description of your website is displayed, and either people enter your site or they do not. I think it is a pretty important factor to have a good meta description in order to compel people to visit your website rather than someone else's.

Relevant content. I can't stress how important this is. Search engines not only look for your keywords, but they look for relevant content. If you have a site about dog toys for black labs, and you are mentioning fish or something unrelated in the same post, this is considered very relevant to dog toys for black labs. You want to produce very relevant information based upon the keyword you are targeting. You can use synonymns and other terms that relate to your keywords to stay on subject.

It is important to optimize your pages so that they are designed to be friendly to the search engines, but there is a great deal of work to be done behind the scenes to improve your search engine results. I spend more time doing behind the scene work than I do building optimized web pages. Some people consider this the most important factor in SEO, and I agree for the most part. So what am I talking about here? One word: backlinks. Backlinking is crucial into being considered a trusted website, as a reward for being trusted by the search engines, you will appear higher in the search engine results and attract more natural visitors. Backlinking is simply when another website links to your website. For example, you can find a backlink HERE. That is a backlink to Google. It points to Google. You want the same thing, you want people to point to your website. It builds authority in Google's eyes and makes your site more powerful. But even better than that is when someone points to your website using the keyword you are building your site around in the anchor text. The anchor text in my previous example for Google was HERE. But something that would be more beneficial to Google(even though they don't really need it at this point) is if I would have used anchor text like 'Best Search Engine'. When you get links from websites that contain your keyword in the anchor text it builds your sites authority within that keyword. One other thing I want to mention about backlinks is page rank. Page rank is a rating system that Google assigns to each page that basically show's how relevant Google thinks a website is. The higher the page rank, the more powerful the website is considered. Websites get page ranks between zero and ten, the higher the better. You want to build backlinks from relevant websites with a high page rank. That is the best you can ask for. If you have a website about Dog Toys, and there is a huge authority site called dogtoys.com with a page rank of 6, getting a backlink from that website would be extremely beneficial, but potentially difficult as you are competition to them. So how do we get these backlinks for our website? Here is a few ways:

1. Website Directories -- you can submit your website to web directories in order to build some backlinks. One directory I use is Best Of The Web.
2. Article Marketing -- you can write articles and submit them to article directories in order to build backlinks. You can put a link back to your website in the article. A popular one is Ezine.
3. Social Bookmarking -- You can submit your website to social bookmarking sites like Digg or Reddit
4. Forum Posting -- you can post useful information on forums with a link to your website contained in your signature.
5. Link Baiting -- one of my favorites. This just revolves around writing excellent content that webmasters will link to naturally because of how good it is.

There are other ways, but this is a good place to get started. Building backlinks is not a simple process and it takes a lot of time to do. But it is extremely important to follow through with building backlinks to your website if you are serious about building a website that does well in the search engines.

 I just touched the surface when it comes to SEO, it is a rather large subject and there is a lot to learn about it. You can check out an article on Internet Marketing Promotion which contains some more tips on how to get more exposure for your website. You can also read this free seo book that I recommend to get a more thorough overview of SEO.