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Search Engine Optimization
Written by Stephen Grisham Jr.   
Thursday, 02 April 2009 20:35
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It describes how one might change a website to show up at the top of search engine searches for particular words or phrases. The higher your page ranks on search engines, the more visitors you'll get.
by StephenGrishamJr.


SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It describes how one might change a website to show up at the top of search engine searches for particular words or phrases. The higher your page ranks on search engines, the more visitors you'll get.

There are many SEO related books and resources out there. It is an extremely diverse subject. Consultants are paid thousands of dollars to maximize the potential for a company's website.

Website Ranking

The initial step is to understand how search engines look at and rank websites. Google has a page ranking system. When your page has a higher rank, your website is considered more important. Larger and more relevant websites receive a higher ranking.

Keywords

The words that people commonly type into search engines are keywords -- words that you want your site to be associated with. Do not generalize when picking out keywords. Don't expect a word like "dresses" to bring your site to the top ten lists. A few experts believe that your domain name should contain keywords. Most people agree that your keywords should be in the site's title and description. It is good to have keywords in these fields. The reason for this is that search engines pay lots of attention to these fields. Put keywords and descriptive META tags on your page headers. In this way you will be telling search engines what your site contains. Be sure that the H1 and H2 tags on your website should include the keywords that you want to optimize for.

Content

Use the keywords that you have selected to optimize your website's content. In general practice, the more pages on your website, the better. A lot of search engines - Yahoo and Google for instance - will give bigger websites more credit.

Another important part of SEO is backlinks. Links to your website from other websites are commonly known as backlinks. A higher number of backlinks is desirable. In order to get the best search engine rankings possible, you need to create backlinks. This means abundant backlinks, on the order of hundreds or even thousands. If you are in a competitive market, then this is especially important.

Another method that is becoming increasingly common for adding backlinks is article submission. You can write some articles that are related to your website content and distribute them through article directories. For every submission, another backlink to your website is added through the reference box.

Submitting your website to website directories is called directory submission. This is a very good way to generate backlinks. Additionally, it will help you to attract highly targeted traffic to your website. For the best results, submit your site to many directories.

About the Author:

Stephen Grisham, Jr. is a copy writer for InfoServe Media, LLC. InfoServe Media is a Houston Website hosting and custom Web site design company. They also provide domain registration, search engine optimization (SEO), Directory Submission, SSL certificates and installation and much more.