SEO or search engine optimization is simply the act of enhancing the quality and volume of site visitors to a particular web page or a particular site in search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. SEO aims at maximizing the visibility of a site on search engines, thereby achieving high page rankings. SEO targets free, paid and organic traffic. SEO is an ongoing task which cannot be achieved once and must be done continuously for ever to achieve the desired results.
Keywords play a crucial role in SEO. Keywords or key phrases are the phrases most people type to find what they are looking for. SEO companies use various techniques and software to analyze the traffic and page rankings to decide on the right keywords for a particular page or site. These keywords or key phrases should be easy to remember but catchy too so that visitors keep coming back for more. Keywords are important because they help search engines to provide relevant results to the user’s queries. For example, if your keyword is shoes then it becomes very easy for people to search for what they are looking for in the specified category like men’s shoes or women’s shoes etc.
SEO helps to optimize a website by making it easy to find and understand. The search engine algorithm works on certain factors like length, alphabetical order, word frequency etc. The aim is to make the keyword/s as easy to understand as possible so that more traffic is generated. SEO techniques include building text links to high traffic websites, arranging keywords in titles and headings, creating lists of common keywords etc.
Article writing and submission to article directories is another SEO technique. This is done for two purposes. One is to improve the ranking of the website in search engine results and the other is to generate more traffic to the site. Some search engines like Google penalize websites if they are using duplicate content in their websites. Using keywords that are similar to the main keywords used by the competitors may get you a lower ranking but this will be temporary.
Writing quality articles that provide good keywords is an SEO technique that can also be done by the owners. The objective is to write as many articles as possible that contain popular keywords. The articles should be written in such a way that the user who reads them gets the maximum benefit. SEO experts also suggest including alternate keywords in the body of the article, to augment the probability that the keywords being used by the search engine will be used by the reader.
Email marketing is another SEO technique that helps to increase traffic and visibility. It starts with building a list. Subscribers to the list should be targeted at the market for which they are created. Hence it is important to target specific audiences and not general audiences. This will result in more personalized emails that convert better into sales and thereby to traffic and customer loyalty.