Search Engine Optimization – SEO is a relatively new area but it attracts a lot of attention because the benefits it provides for an Internet marketer are numerous.

Put in layman’s terms, SEO is all the activities you undertake in order to push your site to the top of search results for particular keywords.

The purpose of optimizing a site is to drive targeted traffic to your site. Having high volumes of traffic usually means more prospects to your site which may result to higher profits.

For instance, if you publish PPC (Paid Per Click) ads on your site, you can expect that more traffic means more clicks and therefore more money for you. You can even have RSS feeds and include your PPC ads in them!

How Search Engine Optimization Works

SEO is about keywords. Keywords are the most important factor for good ranking. While different search engines use different algorithms to calculate the relevancy of a page according to the search request, for all of them keywords matter most. It is good to have a keyword density of 3-7 percent, preferably in places like the page title, the headings, or in bold/italics text. However, if your keyword density is suspiciously high, you might get banned from search engines for cheating.

The second most important factor for SEO success are the links from other sites to your site (called also back-links). It is best if the text of the link includes some of your keywords.

There are many legitimate techniques to get links to your site submission of your site to directories and including links to your site in your RSS feeds are some of them. The number and quality of the links to your site affects your page ranking. Generally, the more back-links and traffic your website generates, the higher your page ranking. Search engines give each page a page rank. Additionally, sites such as Alexa.com also rank sites based on their content and traffic.

Search Engine Optimization Best Practices

You can submit your URL directly to search engines, instead of waiting for the SEO-crawlers to find your site and crawl it. SEO crawlers love when you have a sitemap, so you may consider creating one. The simple or most effective way to create a site map is via a site map tool, which automatically generates the sitemap for you.

Good search engine optimization includes ethical practices only. There are many things you can do and even more you shouldn’t do. Having naturally high keywords density is OK but stuffing your pages with keywords is not.

Exchanging links with other web masters is generally OK, unless the other site is a known spammer.

Posting links on social bookmarking sites, article directories and directories listings and other forms of URL submission is an acceptable way to increase your page ranking and drive traffic to your sites but paying other sites to link to you is frowned upon by search engines, so you should avoid doing it.

Search engines are getting smarter and smarter as technology advances. The more optimized your site the better for you to get recognized and the more relevant your keywords to your site’s actual content or product the better. Search engines now have the ability to monitor human behavior like how long your visitor stays on your site or how many pages do they visit etc.

It is now important more than ever to consider satisfying both search engine crawlers and your human visitors when creating your website and your knowledge of search engine optimization will help you a great deal to achieve your online marketing goals

Of course, there is much more to search engine optimization than we can explain in this article but we hope that you already get the idea what optimizing a site means. If you are interested, the best way to improve your knowledge on what the search engine crawler want is to invest your time and energy in researching and reading from SEO-experts, we have more resources for you on search engine optimization you may consider, click on our recommendations to see which one is more beneficial to your business.

To your success and happiness,

Abby Lawal