What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

SEO, or search engine optimization, has come to stay as one of the most important business practices of our times. The number of searches done using keywords has grown dramatically over the past couple of years, making it crucial for anyone who wants their site to be ranked highly to do their part in helping it achieve its potential. For those who aren’t quite sure what SEO is all about, it’s simply the process of optimizing your website, resulting in a much higher page rank. If you want to know more about how SEO works and whether you need to hire someone to optimize your website, this article will explain the ins and outs so that you can make an informed decision.

SEO aims to increase the quality and volume of site traffic from major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing by improving the ranking of the pages on their search results pages. SEO targets unpaid visitors rather than paying visitors or direct traffic, meaning that you don’t have to pay for any clicks to your website. Basically, SEO aims to get your website into the top twenty search results pages (the one that is listed on the first page of the results) for targeted keywords.

Search engine optimization techniques are used not only to improve the quality of the traffic that your website receives, but also the quality of the links that connect users to your website. If your keywords consist of phrases which are highly competitive, then getting high quality links to your website from these phrases is extremely important. Links from other websites will only result in your page ranking being increased. Links which are not relevant, or that lack content will also do nothing for your page rank. These types of links are known as “Dofollow” links.

SEO works because search engine spiders constantly crawl the internet looking for new websites. When a new website is created, then the site is placed within the main index of the search engine. Over time, as the owner of the website, you will begin to notice that your website does not receive as many searches as other sites which may be more relevant. This is due to your link-building strategy. You can easily increase the amount of links, which point back to your website by creating articles and blogs that contain relevant keywords. This will increase the number of websites that link to yours, thereby boosting your own search engine ranking.

Although SEO is an extremely popular method of marketing on the internet today, it should not be confused with link building. Link building is a method in which you create content related to your website and distribute this content through article directories, blogs, forums, and social media. SEO however, is a technique which is designed to make your website more visible to users searching the major search engines using the appropriate keywords. This will increase the chance that your website will appear when a user searches for a related query, and therefore will provide additional exposure and traffic.

As previously stated SEO is a very popular form of internet marketing. It is used by both large and small businesses and has a proven track record of success. It is important for any website owner to carefully assess their current SEO situation and determine if SEO is the best course of action for their business. If a business already has a high ranking on a major search engine, then using SEO may not provide additional benefit. If a business has low rankings or no rankings at all, then SEO is a viable option for improving your website’s search engine ranking.