SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is something that webmasters try to implement on their websites, particularly if it's an online business or if they want a lot of traffic to their sites. Basically, SEO is developing your website in such a way that the search engines will display your site whenever someone does an internet search for specific keywords that you have craftily sprinkled throughout your pages. With the millions of websites out there, it can be very difficult keeping up with the competition so that your site is displayed in the top few search results, or even the first two pages of search results. This article will describe a few things you can do when optimizing your site for the search engines.
Firstly, there are different search engines that people use to find information on the net. The top three that you should be trying to optimize your site for are MSN, Yahoo, and Google. We all want to be at the top of the Google search listings, but it's a good idea to start with MSN and Yahoo, simply because it's usually quicker to get indexed and you still get a significant amount of your website traffic from these search engines. You will get more traffic from Google, but it's a little trickier and probably more competition there.
The next thing you want to do is come up with keywords for your website that you think a lot of people will do internet searches for. This is harder than it sounds and you have to be really careful to choose the right keywords and keyword phrases so that you can beat out the competition. The way to find the best keywords to use on your site is to use a keyword research tool that displays the number of times per month your chosen keyword is searched in the three major search engines. You may initially think that the more a term is searched, the more traffic you will get, but think again! The more a term is searched, the harder it will be to get your site ranked in the top few search results, or the first few pages of search results. You want to choose terms that are less popular, but still have a significant number of searches. A good number to aim for is any term that is searched about 5000-10000 times per month. It's pretty difficult to do this without using a keyword research tool, such as Good Keywords.
Once you've found some good keywords, you want to go into the source code for your site and add those keywords to your HTML code in the right places. The best places to put your keywords are in the title tag, H1 and H2 header tags, the description tag, and then sprinkled throughout the text on your pages. Keyword density is an important factor that the search engines take into consideration when listing pages in the search results. While you want to repeat your keywords throughout your text, you also want to be careful not to overload your pages with the same keywords to make it obvious that you're just trying to get ahead in the search engine listings. If you try this, you risk getting your site banned, so try to maintain a relatively high keyword density, but not too high.
Now that you have your site sprinkled with enough good keywords, it's time to write articles on topics related to your keywords. Use those keywords in the article title, the first paragraph, within the body of the text, and in the conclusion, again without overloading the text with your keywords. There is no better way to get traffic to your site, links pointing back to your site, and the search engines to visit your site than by writing a good quality, original article with your search terms embedded throughout. These are the basics of keywords and SEO!
