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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something that many people have heard of but few people really and truly understand. This is very unfortunate because as an internet marketer one of the best things you can do for your business is to thoroughly understand what Search Engine Optimization means and how you can go about becoming an expert at it.
The single biggest way that Search Engine Optimization will help you is in generating targeted traffic for your website. Not just traffic mind you, but targeted traffic. This means that people that visit your website will actually be looking for what it is you have to offer and you can probably understand conceptually how that is going to be much better for you than non-targeted traffic. In addition, if you have a website that is properly optimized for use in the search engines you are going to save money because you will not need to spend as much on other methods of traffic generation like pay per click advertising.
Now that you understand how Search Engine Optimization is going to be useful to you it is time to get into some of the basics of the SEO process. There are generally two parts to SEO that you want to be aware of, “on-page” optimization factors and “off-page” optimization factors.
On-page optimization factors are things that you can change on your website in order to make the website more friendly to search engines. These are things like keyword density within paragraphs as well as keyword placement within the title of the webpage, Meta tags and the bolding, underline and italicizing of keywords within the webpage. These are all factors that affect how search engines view your webpage and getting these just right is one of the keys to proper Search Engine Optimization.
While onpage factors are important, anyone that has done SEO work before will be able to tell you that it is the off-page optimization factors that really make the search engines love your page. In terms of off-page optimization, the primary thing I’m talking about is link building.
Whenever another website links to your page they are in effect casting a vote in favor of what your page has to offer. The more websites that link to your page, the more votes you get and therefore the more favorably many of the search engines look at your website. There are entire online courses dedicated to the concept of link building as it is truly one of the most important parts of proper Search Engine Optimization and if you get just one part of the whole picture right; make sure it’s this part.
Recent trends in Search Engine Optimization have been set in by a lot of search engines in order to combat the “black hat” techniques many dishonest marketers have been using in order to get their websites good rankings. These trends have made it much more difficult to get your site well-ranked in search engines and indeed it can take months before you even get a sniff of the top. One way to combat this is to use blog posts regularly or make entries on web 2.0 sites (Craigslist, Digg etc.) as these posts get indexed on a daily basis by search engines. You can then place links on those posts that point back to your website and get it indexed that way.