What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization, otherwise known as SEO, is when you make your website easier to find in search engine results when an individual searches for a topic similar to the content of your web page.

For example, if you have created a web page geared toward physical fitness products, the goal would be to have your website appear on the first page in Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc., when someone searches for “physical fitness products”. The better your search engine ranking, the more visitors will access your website. Hardly anyone will ever find your website if your web page appears on page 25. Most people don’t search past the first or second page, unfortunately.

There are ways to optimize your website in the search engines by doing on-page SEO as well as off-page SEO.

So, what is on-page SEO? It is what you can do within your website to optimize the search engine results. For example, search engines use search algorithms to decide if the content of your website is a replica of the information on another similar website that has already been ranked, which in turn could hurt your search engine ranking. Others seem to think it doesn’t matter one bit.

Also, the words, or phrases, an individual puts into a search engine to get the answers they need are the keywords you want to assign to each page within your website. By assigning the most targeted keywords to your web pages, you can greatly impact how much traffic you will get to your website. This is in part because the search engines evaluate the information on your web page to be sure that the content is related to the keywords you assigned. Makes sense …. but it can get a lot more complicated than that, so this is definitely something you will need to pay a LOT of attention to when first starting out. You may end up “tweaking” your keywords and content many times before you get it right. Believe me, I did!

Off-page SEO can be a bit more involved. A lot of people say that off-page SEO is even more important than on-page SEO when it comes to how the search engines rank your web pages. The most effective way to accomplish off-page SEO is to get as many links back to your web pages as possible from other websites. The more links you have back to your web pages, the more the search engines believe that your information is relevent and reliable. If a ton of people have links to your website on their web pages, then your site must be pretty good, right?

There are a number of techniques and “tricks” to optimize your website and every single course or software package will promise the world when it comes to SEO. But, do they deliver?

There are tons of great products out there, so do your research and find out which one is best for YOU!