In the online world it is the survival of the fittest. In October 2008 the web consisted of approximately 182 million sites, according to Netcraft. That's why SEO is so important.
Every owner of a website is dreaming of a good search engine placement. A lot of businesses depend on such a good listing. That's why we have SEO - Search Engine Optimization. This technique makes sure that a website has a high spot on the result pages of any search engine. Whenever users search the web using a particular word or phrase, there will be a match with websites that focus on that word or phrase called `keywords'.
How can you use Search Engine Optimization? First and for all, it's about keywords. So you need to find the words and/or phrases your audience will use when using a search engine. After all they are prospects for what you have to offer. Here are some basic rules:
The match between the keywords and your website must be as good as it can get, so getting higher rankings is more likely.
The keywords are as unique as possible in order to beat the competition and to get higher rankings.
Each page or section of your website has the right keywords and as many as possible.
Don't forget the geographical angle
Can you get help with looking for the best SEO keywords? Yes, certainly, online you will find lots of tools that can help you decide about keywords. Google and Microsoft have them, to name a few, but there really are many more. Studying sites of the competition may also be handy.
What's next once you have your keywords? Best thing to do is using the top SEP keywords in the meta tags of your site and to put them in the html head tags. It is important for search engines that you use keywords in your title tag as well. So you make a short title tag for all the pages of your site, as unique as possible. In the meta tag where you give a description of your website you write a short text with, of course, the most relevant keywords in it.
Is there anything else you should think of in Search Engine Optimization? Try to make your site as SEO friendly as can be. That means the content of your site should be easy readable, original and very structured. Search engines love well structured websites. Also the surfer should get a good impression about the site he is about to visit.
Most important: fulfil the user's need. Making your site SEO friendly is a mean to an end: you want to fulfil the end-user's needs. Search engines want to provide quality results to their users, their existence is based on that. So your site is not only relevant to the surfer but also easy to navigate. Surfers and targeted visitors alike, the easier the navigation of your site, the longer they linger.