What is SEO

What is SEO? SEO means Search Engine Optimization. It involves the art and process of making your website to rank high in major search engines when a specific word is searched by a potential visitor through a particular search engine like Google, Hotbot, AltaVista, MSN Search, AlltheWeb, etc.

If you are a website designer with out the knowledge of search engine optimization, then you need to wake up. This is the only sure way through which you can attract thousands of visitors to your website. If your website is not properly optimized for search engines, then your website may not be listed on the search engine or have a very low rank in search engines. With out a nicely optimized website you may now even have up to 10 visitor yearly in your website.

Search Engine Optimization is the only free and sure way to attract many visitors to a website. A properly optimized website will rank among the first 10 in a search engine. When your website rank for a particular word on a website is beyond 10, then, there is every tendency that your website may not be view by potential visitors to your website. There is every possibility that you will lose your would-be visitors to properly optimized website.

The greater part of websites found on the internet do not fully use search engine optimization, this fact alone could boost your own ranking. To get a higher position in the search engine result page (SERP's) can be accomplished by using both on-page and off-page optimization.

Not being able to physically see your webpage and read the content search engines rely on the algorithms they have programmed to determine page relevance and ranking. When searching your site they can be confused by flawed design and irrelevant code. Make it easy for them to understand what your webpage is about, the use of meta tags is imperative to achieve this.

Keywords play a major part in on-page optimization. Use them in the title tag, description tag and header tags. Remember not to keyword spam using keyword density to keep this in check. Many times you will get ranked for keywords in your content that you did not intend to. This is why relevant and original content must be used by you. It is all about description, creating it for your visitors and the search engines so they know what the page is concerned with.

Off-page optimization is primarily incoming links to your website and the relevance and ranking of these incoming links. What this means is, the incoming links should be arriving from websites in the same theme as your own website and the page rank of these links will obviously be taken into consideration. The easiest and best way of getting incoming links is from articles, with said link in the resource box provided by the article directories. The more articles you put out there the more incoming links from a high page rank website there will be directed to your website.

You can also do reciprocal linking with other webmasters in the same niche or theme of your website, although this can be very disheartening but very productive. Of course you will have to have quality content if you are wanting reciprocal links. Having quality content will bring you loads of links, as they say "content is king", going further "quality content is king". Everyone rates content, consider the last article you read or the last webpage you looked at, did you read all the content on the page? That is quality content.

Search engine optimization in conclusion is, remembering that search engines can' t physically read your web pages. Optimization of your web pages and the use of meta tags should be remembered. Meta tags are very important for the engines to be able to determine what your web page is about. Also, content is important for both visitors and search engines. It must make sense to both. Links to your website and web pages will determine that your site is an authority in the particular theme or niche you are targeting, therefore it will rank higher in the search engine results, putting your website in public view every time that keyword or phrase you optimized for is typed into the search engines.