Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the act of altering or optimizing your website and it’s content in order that search engines deem it to be relevant and useful to certain topics. You are able to select the most appropriate topics through the use of certain keywords in your website.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or "organic" results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, the computer-programmed algorithms that dictate search engine behavior, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. SEO is performed because a website will receive more visitors from a search engine when websites rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP). These visitors can then potentially be converted into customers.
When people conduct searches on search engines they are presented with a list of results for that search term. These results are displayed on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and generally speaking, the websites that appear at the top of the SERPs will receive plenty of traffic to their websites from searchers. All traffic, at no advertisement cost.
In order to determine your position on the SERPs, search engines use their own algorithms. While nobody knows for absolute certain what these algorithms are it is widely accepted that your website needs to be easy to navigate, popular, and relevant.
Easy navigation means that your site should have internal links to each of its pages. You should include a sitemap in order that search engines and visitors can quickly and easily find their way around the whole of your website. The search engines will record all links, faster.
In order to drive more traffic to your website, you must have sufficient value on the website such that other people would write about your website or link to your website. While search engines would value these links, that were generated because visitors to your site genuinely found your content useful, it is commonplace to undertake a reciprocal link campaign or generate inbound links. Reciprocal links mean a website links to you in exchange for a link to their own site. Reciprocal links do tend to have a negative effect on your website.
Relevance is judged by your content. By including the keywords you place in the metatags of your site throughout the body of your content and in certain places within your site you are indicating to the search engines that your website contains relevant information.
By combining these factors you can effectively convince search engines that you deserve to be near the top of their SERPs. However, this can take time and a lot of effort if you don’t fully understand what you are doing. Until you are at the top of your niche, generate content!
