Search engine optimization (SEO) is a great solution to anyone who wants to drive traffic to their site. But what is this bizarre thing known as search engine optimization — what does it even mean, and how can it possibly help your website?

On the internet, most people access websites via search engines or other sites. Since therer are billions of web pages search engines, like Google, act as filters for content. That being said, it is very important for your website to appear on the first few pages of those search engine results.

In general, nobody will look on the 99th page of a Google search result set! That would take forever, and the most relevant results are usually placed first. So how do you make your website “relevant” in the search engine’s eyes? How can your website appear on the first few pages of the results?

Results pages are driven by keywords. Keywords are the typical phrases a user types in when searching such as “web design texas”. You must match your website content (and intent) to the keywords people will be searching for, and then optimize for these keywords.

That’s where search engine optimization comes in. When people use search engines, they type in certain keywords, and the program behind the search engine looks for these keywords in the domain names, file names, and content of the website.

If there is careful repition of certain keywords, the search engine tends to place that website higher on the list of results, because it would be marked as “more relevant” to the search input. Websites that are only somewhat relevant, according to the search engine software, are put further back. Since you want your website to appear at the front, how would you use search engine optimization to your advantage on your webpage?

Well, you first need to pick a keyword. There are many ways to do this —- you can simply pick what the most relevant phrase to the website is, or you can choose to use different software to help you choose your keywords.

First, there is the Overture Keyword Lookup, which helps to tell you whether the keyword that you are considering using is actually being typed in as a search entry by anybody. This is obviously very important because if you had a great website filled with this keyword and nobody searched for it would be a waste of effort. Nobody would visit your site anyway!

So, you need to ensure that you have chosen a good keyword by checking to see if people search it. Another software tool often used by website owners is the Google Keyword Selector. This software helps you to find what the most commonly related phrases and keywords are. While this may sound fairly useless (why would you use that? You’d have to enter in a keyword to get other keyword phrases! That’s not helpful at all, right? Wrong!), it’s necessary for different pages on your site to have different keywords that are targeted and optimized.

Because there are so many billions of websites on the Internet, it’s likely that the keyword you picked has also been chosen by many other people. If you use a general keyword in this case, such as “Frisbee”, then it’s likely that there are tons of other sites dedicated to Frisbee that are greatly relevant, and yours may not be showcased on the first few result pages.

However, with the Google Keyword Selector, you can find keyword phrases related to “Frisbee” that people still search and that may yield fewer results. You will want to focus on the keyword that is searched often and results in fewer relevant websites, because otherwise your website might be overwhelmed by competition.

After you have chosen a suitable keyword or keyword phrase, the next step is to implement that keyword throughout all areas of that page or your website. It’s good to have the keyword in your domain name (or at least the page URL), for each page; it should also be contained in the title, the Header tag, and the footer of the web page. Moreover, you need it in your meta description and meta keyword tags (this is a place where the search engine program searches extensively).

Finally, it’s essential to have your keyword repeated at least several times throughout your text (2-3% is recommended). If you follow all of these instructions, then your website is well on its way to being optimized for search engines using this keyword!

This is called “on page” optimization; meaning you are optimizing the contents of your page to be found by the search engines. “Off page” optimization is incredibly important too, many folks say that off page optimization can count for 65% of your success. We will cover this topic in other blog posts. An example of off page optimzation is called “Link building.”

Have you ever created a successful website and tried to market it, but nobody ever looked at it? As a website owner or designer, it critical that you optimize your website so that it appears on or near the first page of a search engine results page for important keywords.

It isn’t about flashy, beautiful graphics and a wonderfully designed site anymore, because no matter how beautiful your page is, you won’t be guaranteed any visitors. No, these days, it’s all about SEO—search engine optimization. SEO is the key to getting your website noticed.

Many website owners hire SEO Firms (search engine optimization firms) to optimize their websites for them. No SEO firm has any special relationship with Google or Yahoo! — and if they claim they do, then it’s likely to be a scam. Also beware of SEO firms that promise to make your website #1 on the search results page (SERP) when you enter a certain keyword or set of keywords. There is no way to guarantee that your site will be first to show up on the first page, so be cautious.

The first thing to pay attention to about your website is the domain name. Before you even purchase the domain name for your website, you should start thinking about search engine optimization and consider how it might help your website.

First, you need to pick the keyword or keywords that you’re going to optimize your site for—but don’t just pick any set of words that are relevant; pick a set of keywords that you think that someone will be likely to type into a search engine bar when searching for your site or company. For instance, it is likely that nobody will ever type in something like “SEO chocolate”, because those are unrelated keywords, while “SEO keywords” might be a popular search phrase. Try to aim for the popular search phrases—the more people searching, the more chances that some of them will hit your website.

When you pick your domain name, it’s good to have your SEO keyword(s) in the domain name if you can because the search engine will notice that your domain name has the words and give you credit for that. Of course, this is not always possible.

While many factors influence the search engine results pages (SERPs) having keywords in your domain or file names will help. And, that will put your site higher on the results list.

If you’re going to optimize keywords for a subpage of your website, be sure to label your subfolder with your chosen keywords so that the search engine programs that are indexing your page see that the keyword is in your folder name—this helps with the SEO of your site for those keywords.

The program will then parse through all of your site’s text, and when it finds several instances of your optimized keyword in there, it will better relate your website to the keyword. Thus, you can guarantee that you will at least appear when someone types in the keyword you optimized. Search engines are now highly intelligent on how they relate keywords to pages and sites, and full SEO guidelines are beyond the scope of this article.

There is no guarantee as to what page you’ll appear on even if you optimize. It pays to focus on niches and develop keywords around them too. Getting to page one of Google for “lawyer” is a lot harder than “lawyer texas”. It pays to find a niche (or several niches) that have been previously under-utilized — take advantage of it using search engine optimization for those keywords.