What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

What is search engine optimization? This is a question that every WordPress blog owner should know and understand the answer to because it is so important to use SEO tools and techniques on your WordPress blog to maximize the amount of exposure your blog gets on a search engine.

For any new website, knowing and understanding the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is vital to making sure your site gets lots of web traffic. Search engine optimization is a useful tool that can help your site be one of the top searched.

Search engines are one of the top ways those who use the Internet find websites for the area of interest they are searching. The search engine provides a comprehensive directory that narrows the results according to key words or topics. However with so many web sites available on the web, it can be difficult to narrow down these results. For anyone who has ever used Google or Yahoo! or a similar search engine to search for a particular topic or website, there can often be thousands of websites to wade through.  Most Internet users do not want to take the time to search through each and every result. That is why it is important to make sure your website is one of the top results found on the results page of a search engine. To do this, you need to know and understand the tool of search engine optimization.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Everyone wants high rankings of their website. It can be extremely competitive, which is why SEO is a great tool to use to ensure this happens for your website. Search engine optimization works by ensuring that your web sites are accessible to search engines and are focused in a certain way to make sure they have a higher chance of being discovered by the search engine. With SEO, you can build  your website to help ensure it will rank high in the results of the search engines.

How to use SEO:

In order to use SEO techniques, you have to understand how it works. There are a couple different types of search engines that all work in different ways. Depending on how they work, the SEO techniques might change. With crawler-based search engines, like Google, the listings are created automatically with the results found by a “spider” that “crawls” through the web to find the sites with the highest key words or best information on a certain topic. Those are the results that are ranked the highest on that type of search engine. With human-powered directories, you search using a description of what you are looking for rather than a keyword. These sites are then reviewed with the highest reviewed also receiving the highest ranking. There are also hybrid search engines that are a mixture of crawler and human based directories. These are the most common types of search engines now like Bing. SEO takes into consideration how these particular search engines work, what people are searching for and how the searches are phrased.

When it comes to using SEO with your website, it usually involves editing the content and coding content to increase the relevance of the information based on what is being search on the search engines. The website may need more keywords added to articles, links, titles and other locations throughout the website. The SEO tactics are essentially integrated into the website development and design of the website. One thing to be weary of when incorporating these SEO practices is to not over saturate your website with excessive keywords to try and manipulate your rankings. When this happens, the search engine will flag it as spam and will not include your website in with the rest of the results or will put it to the bottom of the list.

Other SEO tips:

  • Cross linking between websites is a great way to increase your website visibility on the web because it is generating traffic to more than one page.
  • Updating content regularly is also an essential part of increasing the prominence of your website. This helps keep your material fresh and more likely to be searched.
  • Sometimes keywords or topics can get really competitive and it is unlikely your site will be found amidst the competition. Choosing unique topics or keywords that aren’t as competitive to use on your website is a great way to increase web traffic to your site via search engine results.
  • Useful tools like Google Adwords PageRank is a great way to find what search results and competition the keywords are getting. That way you can get a good idea to figure out what keywords would work best on your website.

It might take some trial and error using these tips to eventually decide what works best for your website. Because there are so many different ways to ensure high ranking on a search engine, it all depends on the type of website you have to employ the best SEO tactics. Do what works best for you to get the highest results you can on the web to increase web traffic to your web page.