Tuesday, June 7, 2011

What Really Is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization or SEO if you like is a way of analyzing a website and altering it to become search-engine friendly so that the search engines can be able to easily read and index it. SEO is about customizing a website to get high rankings on the search engines. The reasons for high search engine rankings are obvious — when web surfers use the search engines to look for something, they rarely search beyond the top 10 results and as such, if a website is to benefit you, it needs to get rankings among the top 10, if not the first slot.

Even though SEO has been in existence for quite a long time now, it has gained popularity only in the recent past. This is due to advancement in technology where new tools such as use of Java applications, many images, and Flash require a website to be optimized so that the search engine spiders can read the site easily. Note that if the content of your website cannot be read by the search engines, definitely the site will not be indexed meaning it will not be available to your potential visitors when they look for it on the search engines.

Basically, the search engines have a very huge database that they maintain with information of all websites available. The information however is never listed on the search engine’s results page but they take the information into consideration when ranking websites. As such, a webmaster should ensure they optimize their sites to selected keywords and also when submitting the websites so that the sites get ranked. Note that if you use a set of keywords on your website, you should use the same in your submission tool lest you send mixed signals to the search engines and interfere with your rankings.

The right keywords can be obtained through thorough research.  There are tools that can be used to identify the right keywords.  They can give you data as to how many times certain words are searched by web users. However, if you use the most frequently used keywords, expect a stiffer competition.

The major search engines today are free hence you should take advantage and advertise your products and services for free, which you can do in as little as an hour. If you are not adept on SEO, you can always hire professionals to do the work for you. Even so, the internet is full of resources that can enlighten you on SEO, which is a good thing so that you cannot be left on the dark even as you hire someone.

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