Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Importance of Search Engine Optimization

By Justin Harrison

The pages and position on a page that a website appears when a user searches for a specific key term is determined by search engine optimization. Websites that are properly optimized appear at the top pages and rank highly than others. Search engine optimization (SEO) is important to any company or individual who has set up a website. This is because it determines how your website will rank for a given keyword search.

Website traffic is related to sales; the more traffic you have, the higher your sales will be. Having a website on the internet is only a first step to getting traffic. You must incorporate SEO for the traffic to come sufficiently. Most web users search for products and services by typing a keywords or key phrase in a search engine. Therefore, you should optimize your website based on the keywords that your customers will use to search for you. It is rare to find users who directly go to the homepage of a website to get a specific product. Most will search for the product and then visit the top results displayed by search engines. This is why SEO is important.

You need not make huge monetary investments to get your SEO program going. You could hire an SEO expert or tie up with a firm, to get all your SEO work done. Doing SEO on your own is another very good idea. It is very easy to learn the tips and tricks of SEO. Once you have decided to do your SEO yourself, you would spend absolutely no money for your SEO campaign. You are not supposed to pay any money to the search engines for ranking your website higher.

To optimize your website, you have to use the appropriate keyword in the appropriate places. The Title tag, images tag ("alt? tag), headings, and content of your website must contain your keyword or key phrase. This will make it easier for the search engine to determine that your website is related to a certain keyword and hence rank you highly for that keyword. Ensure you space the keywords evenly on the webpage so that you are not penalized for keyword stuffing. The keywords should be used as part of a sentence and not alone. This makes it easier for your visitors to read and understand your content, and is a safe SEO practice.

Apart from using keywords, you should also consider link building when optimizing your website. Link the pages of your website to pages of other websites that are in the same industry as you. This will make your website to be ranked highly. Ensure that the websites you link to also link back to you as search engines look at the number of quality backlinks your website has when ranking it. Moreover, you can write articles related to your niche and submit them to article directories. This is a good way of increasing traffic and backlinks to your website. Participating in forums and blogs will also increase your backlinks and traffic as well.

Some of the established companies do not invest time and money into SEO, for they do not find it lucrative. They choose different methods such as PPC. However, SEO is worth a try, if you have the time and commitment to do it. If you have the same, then your answer to the question, ?is SEO the right choice?? should be 'yes'.

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