Those new to internet marketing may have come across the letters “SEO” without understanding its meaning. According to Wikipedia, SEO “is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion.”
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In a nutshell, there is a reason why Google ranks a website first, second or last for a particular keyword. Through proper execution of solid SEO tactics, a website that does not currently list on Google can move up to top ranking.

Google is the current King of the search engine websites and is the main search engine that SEO experts focus on when optimizing a web page. Optimizing a website requires a solid understanding of what Google is looking for when ranking a website. Google’s ultimate goal is to find websites that would be successful even if Google wasn’t around. That is, the websites that have great content that everyone liked would be linked to, sending them traffic even without search engines like Google being involved. These are the sites that Google is typically going to rank highest.

Acquiring relevant links from other websites called backlinks is an important component of SEO. Additional, internal linking (links within a website) are also important. First, let discuss backlinks, which are links on other websites pointing to your website. Each and every link pointing to your site counts as a “vote” for your site. Back linking can be accomplished in a variety of ways and the most effective way for a small business is through social media sites (like Twitter, Facebook), article submissions and blog post. There are a number of other social media sites and various other methods for generating back links which will be discussed at another time. It is important that back links not be haphazardly placed. Back links should be linked to quality websites that are relevant to yours. For example, if your site deals with golf, the backlinks should come from sites dealing with golf, sports, and athletics. Randomly placing links on sites that lack a relevant cohesion will have a negative impact on the sites SEO ranking as Google is always looking for relevancy.

Internal linking relevancy has become more important to Google these days and it is important to have many internal links (links that point to another page on your site) through out a website. Relevancy is a key word here as Google is looking for “truth in advertising” if you will. I’m sure you have a seen a website or an email that uses the phrase “click here for more information”. When Google reads “click here” it is expecting that when clicked on the link will take you to a page with information on “click here”. Where is the truth in advertising when the “click here” link takes you to a page regarding golf balls as an example? Instead of using “click here”, a better choice would be “…view golf ball selection.” with the words “golf balls” being the link phrase that is linked to the golf ball page.

Regarding the design of your page, adding a site map to the mix is also helpful. A site map links to all the pages on your website. Through a site map, the search engine crawlers can find and index every page your site. There are many free services that will generate a sitemap.html document that can then be uploaded to your site.

Within the tags of the HTML codes of your site, it is possible to add commonly used search terms and word. These are known commonly as meta tags and can help improve the indexing of a site in the search engines. It is important, however, that you select relevant words or else the search engines may frown on your site. Besides the “HEAD” tags, it is important to complete META description, META keywords and a number of other related HTML code with specific description of each page on a website.

The website should also include a number of relevant keywords within its text. Keywords are essentially those terms that match what people type when they use a search engine. For example, someone looking to lose weight might type in “weight loss supplements” in the search engines. If your website sells weight loss supplements, you would want those keywords to appear within at least 1.5% of your text. Actually, you can have more two or three keyword phrases within the text of the site.

This is just a brief overview of SEO. Each section of SEO could have a book written on it. It is important to understand that a strong SEO presence requires a solid understanding of how Google “reads” each page and each word on your website and optimizing the content to Google likings. Which, by the way, is known to constantly change as the internet become more and more cluttered with information. Like a good marketing campaign, SEO is a long term commitment that when utilized correctly will have a positive impact on your bottom line and is the only way to dominate your market presence on the internet.