Why You Need Search Engine Optimization

Business online is a cutthroat affair, with everyone vying for business and attempting to out do the competition. To succeed, you need the tools and know how that can put you ahead of the pack. Every day, the search engines analyze their data and often restructure the search results for a given keyword or phrase. Site owners and marketers fight hard to get the top spots and then to stay there. To get and stay on top, you need to know how to make your site look better than the others to the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a term that refers to optimizing a web page's content to maximize its ranking in a search engine for specific keywords and phrases. For the past few years and the foreseeable future, search engines will be the most widely used tool for finding information and products on the Internet. So they will be the number one marketing tool for websites.

The Holy Grail of SEO is to appear in the top ten results of a search. The vast majority of users rely on the first page (usually ten) of matches to find what they're looking for when they search. You can imagine that, with thousands of sites vying for those ten spots, the competition is very fierce. The higher your rank, the more traffic you'll get and the more business you'll rake in.

It's essential to business survival online that you get a good search engine ranking and then work hard to continue improving it. Higher rankings are better and staying on top is imperative once you get there. So how do you do this?

Using SEO is imperative to your business' life. Let's say your conversion rate (the number of visitors you turn into sales) is around 1%. That's a decent conversion rate for online sales and it means that you're getting 1 of every 100 visitors to your site to purchase from you. Now, let's say that you can increase your number of visitors to 10,000...yep, that 1 sale just ballooned into 1,000 sales. Big difference, huh? That's what SEO can do for your site. Now let's look at how it's done.

It's not easy getting to the top in search results. In fact, for most of us, it's probably never going to be more than a dream. It's possible to do it, though, or no one would try (or be there now, for that matter). The trick to getting into the coveted top ten is total optimization of your site's content, from top to bottom, so that it targets the keyword or phrase you're aiming to market. So to start with, you'll need to know what those keywords and phrases should be.

Once you know that, then you can begin tuning your site to focus on those chosen words and phrases. The content will need to be rewritten to reflect these new words, but not so heavily inundated with them as to be unreadable (and worse, be considered "keyword spam" by the engines themselves). Other little details like file names, photo tags, and other things should be changed to reflect these new targeted words and phrases as well. In all, you'll want to match the current guidelines for SEO as agreed to by the majority of marketers who study the search engines and how they work.

The engines are updating themselves regularly and don't publish information about how they do their searches, specifically because they want to be "neutral" and do not want people changing how their searches operate by filling them with non-informative, commercial content. They also don't want their competition (other engines) to mimic their results, as the search engines actually compete with one another for dominance.

Finally, in your quest to reach the top, you'll want to collaborate with sites similar to (but not competing with) yours to make link exchanges and symbiotic relationships of sales referrals, so that you can build a network of sites around yours that will all help you achieve higher rankings.

For more specific details, you can read a vast array of "how to" marketing articles on this subject. Hopefully, I've shown you why it's important. Now it's up to you to make it happen.