Understanding Search Engine Optimization

If you are a website creator, online business owner, or blogger learning the basics of search engine optimization will improve the traffic which can increase earnings or your online reputation. To begin understanding search engine optimization you must first understand the job of search engines. Their main purpose is to provide their customers with the best search results fitting the search queries entered. This means if you provide an accurate description of your website using meta tags and have a quality based website which an audience would search for then the search engines job is to place you in front of the audience seeking your content. The problem with search engine optimization is this rarely happens. For the most part webmasters have figured out how Google and the other major search engines decide on who should be placed where so can specifically design a website for a set of keywords and build links for the words to rank well.

When you attempt to optimize your website it is important to never sacrifice your visitor satisfaction for search engine optimization. This defeats the whole purpose of ranking your website well. A higher quality website will earn more with much less traffic compared to a website specifically designed for search engines. The first step of search engine optimization is figuring out the keywords that you would like to rank well for. There are two things you should consider when choosing keywords. The most important thing to consider is how accurately the keywords you are choosing represent your website. High ranking does mean more traffic, but the only traffic worth getting to your presence is the traffic looking for what you offer. Un targeted traffic simply put is a drain on bandwidth. You may get one or two sales, but the conversion rate on your site will be extremely low.

Another important factor when choosing keywords for a presence is the amount of traffic they have. To see the given amount of traffic for any given keyword type into Google “Google Adwords Keyword Tool”. Input the keywords which you think accurately represent your site. This tool will show you the monthly traffic for any keyword given and the traffic for 99 related keywords. Make sure you look through all the keywords checking for high traffic keywords which relate to your site. Once you have ten or so keywords start creating your presence. Use the keywords in the URL, Titles, and within the content. This will tell Google that your site relates to those keywords and you should be ranked for them.

The final aspect of Search Engine Optimization is using external sources in an attempt to rank your presence well. This is also known as link building and should be used cautiously. When attempting to build links towards your site only use white hat or ethical link building methods. These types of link building efforts include directory submission, article writing, and link exchanges with relevant sites. Another couple helpful tips when link building is understanding that not all links are created equally. The most valuable links are one way, relevant, and high page rank. These are the most difficult links to build so usually you will have to settle with only a couple of these link attributes. For free link directories use the thousands of free directories at directorycritic.com. For article marketing search Google for “list of article directories”. Link exchanges can sometimes be difficult so for these use linkmarket.net.

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