What Is Search Engine Optimization

By Author: Brandon Sheley
Total Articles: 3764
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Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is when a web site owner creates the content on his or her web pages to be more search engine friendly. By doing this the web site receive higher search engine rankings when people search for terms related to the site's content. So what's so important about search engine optimization. Well, if you've worked hard to create a Web site you'll want lots of people to visit it.

If you optimize your web pages for the search engines, a robot will search and index your site more effectively giving it a higher ranking in various search engines. The better you are at search optimization the higher placement you'll get. The goal is to get on the first page of results and ultimately the number one spot! The higher the ranking the more traffic you'll get to your site through this method. More traffic means more revenue for you.

When creating your Web site, you'll want to use the right search engine optimization techniques. This will have a major impact on the success of your Web site. You can hire a company with SEO expertise to do it for you or you can study SEO and apply several techniques ...
... yourself. You can find out what works best for your site.

While you'll receive more general traffic by using SEO, you'll also get more traffic from your targeted audience. If your site covers a specific topic, you'll want to reach the appropriate audience for that topic. As an example, if you're selling model cars, you'll want to attract visitors interested in that hobby, not just those that are interested in cars in general. Having search engine optimization that attracts those interested in model cars will increase your sales. Attracting your key audience to visit your site can actually be more important that drawing large amounts of general traffic. Those targeted visitors are more likely to be repeat visitors and to pass along your web site address to others with the same interest.

There are two kinds of SEO methods. These are white hat and black hat. The first, white hat, is the appropriate methods that fall in line with the search engine's guidelines. This the honest approach to SEO. The content on the page is unique and visitor oriented, not just created for the search engines. On the other hand, black hat SEO are unethical methods including cloaking, which is having a web page optimized that leads visitors to another page with different content. This is somewhat a bait and switch technique. Using black hat methods are risky because if a search engine finds you've been using these methods, your site's rank could be lowered or the site could be taken out of the database completely. It may not be worth the risk to you to use black hat methods for your web site.

Search Engine Optimization is an important part of creating your Web site. This is a free way to generate a high number of visitors for your site. And you have the option to pay someone to help you optimize your site if you choose. To get a high number of targeted visitors to your site, SEO is the must.