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  Search engine optimization - Basics

What is Search engine optimization or search engine marketing?

As wikipedia puts it - Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site’s relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users. Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove them from their indices.

Why is search engine optimization needed?

Imagine you have a shop that you have spent a lot of effort, time and money planning and setting up. It is the best in the locality but also the newest. You have th best shop but have no customers or visitors as people do not know about it. Being the best or not does not matter unless you have customers visiting the shop and for customers to visit it you need to market/promote your shop.

Same goes for your website, your website needs to have traffic and for that you need to do search engine optimization.If your website is not ranked in the first few search result pages, would you have many visitors/ much traffic ?

Search engine optimization - what you need to do ?

For search engine optimization you first need to do keyword research. Keyword are word/phrases that web surfers would typically enter to do a search.

You then optimize you web pages around these keywords for achieving search engine optimization.

The title of the page should include the keyword. The content of the page should be relevant and should use the keyword. The more the keyword density, the more optimized is your page but then do not try to stuff keyword into your page - you do want repeat visitors to your website who appreciate your content.

Search engine optimization also means a higher page rank. Search engines see what other websites think about your site when ranking you. You need to have quality inbound links to your pages from sites that are good and hold similar information.