What Is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a hot topic. Using it will help grow your business online and get you noticed. What is it really?

Search engine optimization is a term used to describe how search engines work for you, the website owner. Think about this for a moment: You want to research a topic online. You enter certain words into a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. The computer spits out results and you view them to see what fits your needs.

How you get those results has a lot to do with search engine optimization. The words you enter into a search engine are called keywords or keyword phrases. 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 that 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 ranked at the top? For keyword-optimized content, keywords that show up three to seven percent of the time are ranked higher than content with less frequent keywords. This often referred to as keyword density.

Search engines index your content and WebPages for ranking. Keyword-dense content has a good chance of rising to the top in the rankings. However, 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 can also ranked high.

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.

Are you looking for a way to drive traffic to your website? Consider search engine optimization for your WebPages and content.

For an easy to use, do-it-yourself SEO solution, look at Web CEO.