When someone asks about online marketing or increasing website traffic, one of the recommendations frequently offered is to utilize search engine optimization (SEO). What exactly is it?

Search engine optimization is a strategy to increase visitors to a website by placing high up in search results when someone uses a search engine to search for keywords related to your topic

Think about how you go about researching a topic online. You enter certain words into a search engine such as Google or Yahoo and are presented with results – usually pages and pages of results. As you review them to see what fits your needs, it’s likely that you’ll visit the first few sites, and if you find what you need there, you won’t return to the search results to view more sites.

The order in which sites are listed in those search results has a lot to do with search engine optimization. The words you enter into a search engine are called keywords. If you ever look at the top of your search results you will see the number of results returned plus the words that the search engine used to bring you those results. Now look at the results. The keywords you typed in are bolded either in the titles or in a line of content on that webpage.

By optimizing your web pages and content to match the most common phrases or keywords used for your subject, your content can be found. Ideally, content found on the first two pages of search results are the ones that people will click on. No one wants to sift through five million results. The top content or websites are the ones ranked first.

What makes them top-ranked? One factor is how often the keywords appear in the content For keyword-optimized content, keywords that show up three to seven percent of the time are ranked higher than content with less frequent keywords.

Search engines crawl your content and webpages for ranking. Keyword-dense content has a good chance of rising to the top of the rankings. But, search engine optimization is not just about single keywords, but also two and three word phrases. Longer phrases have become a great way to rank high, since most content tries to match single keywords.

Search engine optimization extends to your domain name as well. If your website has a specific niche, using keywords relative to that niche in your domain name drives traffic to your website. Don’t neglect your webpages either. Individual pages that use search engine optimized headers are also ranked.

For the website owner, using a keyword optimizer makes short work of calculating your keyword density. There are also programs that rank the popularity of certain keyword phrases when searching for information using search engines. Remember, if you can’t be found, it will be hard to sell your product or service to others.

As important as keywords are for SEO, they are not the only factor in determining where your site will be listed in the search engines. Learn more about SEO:

• Grab your free copy of SEO Fast Start by Dan Thies
• Claim your free WordTracker trial today.
• Free guide How to Get Backlinks (the basics)

If you’re looking for more traffic to your site, consider search engine optimization.

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