What Up With SEO? (Search Engine Optimization)

It's become a booming industry. It's being talked about and discussed constantly on blogs all over the world wide web. What is it? Thought you'd never ask. "IT" is SEO. Search Engine Optimization. Have you noticed, it's everywhere. How could you not. It seems every website that's not about internet marketing is centered on or around it. Has me asking ...

What up with SEO?

Well, I did some snooping around and came to find out that what's up with SEO is if you own a website properly optimizing it for search engine traffic is the single most important thing you have to do. Mind you not one of the most important, THE most important. See, on the web everything starts and ends with getting visitors, or traffic onto your website. Carrying out proper optimization techniques so that these free visitors arrive in bunches from search engines is job number one.

Optimizing your website for the major search engines means paying attention to some details that at first may seem like trivial matters. Things like creating web pages and filling them with content that other website owners feel compelled to link to from their own websites. The act of obtaining these incoming links, also know as one way links, is the heart and soul of your SEO strategy. The search engines, and especially Google, really place a lot of value on how many other sites link to your website. Oh, and the quality of the sites linking to your website is important as well.

Along with these incoming links there are a few other factors that when all mixed together add up to be the very essence of what has become known as search engine optimization or SEO.

These other factors include things like:

Carefully selecting the keywords you build your websites content around. These are the words and phrases that you want to be found under when users search for things they'll find on your site. For example if your site is a bout model trains then when you're writing articles and content for your site you'll want to sprinkle the term model trains in a few times. Don't over do it though, just a time or two more than would be natural when writing on your topic of choice will do just fine.

Wisely choosing which sites you link out to from your website is important to. Being sure not to link to any sites that are considered "bad neighborhood" sites. These would be sites like those known as link farms or sites that have been banned by Google for one reason or another. Not good.

Another important aspect of the SEO process is the title of each page on your website, and I do mean each page. Every page on your website should have it's own unique and appropriate title. The title is where you let potential visitors, and the search engines know what your page is about. I know, I know... you're really fond of the name of your website and it's so easy to just put "MyWebsite.com" as the title of every page but don't do it.

The title is one of many factors that your page is ranked on when it comes to which pages are shown to searchers when they search. A crappy page title will lead to a crappy search result ranking and as a website owner that's certainly not what you want. Besides, a website on which every page has the same title just looks, well... amateurish. Both to human eyes and search engine spiders.

Anyway, like I said seeing and hearing all the talk about it just had me wondering what up with this SEO stuff.

Now we both know.