Search Engine Optimization Tips
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Search Engine Optimization Explained

These days it is critical for any business to have a presence on the web, of course that presence is useless if nobody can find your site. There are literally billions of websites competing for attention on the internet and most of them will never get any visitors. Most sites are found through the search engines, if you want to have any hope of having visitors your site needs to rank well. The way you get you site to rank well is through Search Engine Optimization.

Search engine optimization is nothing more than telling the search engines what your website is about and convincing them that your site is the most relevant for the search term in question. Search engines want to provide the most relevant results for every search query and they need a way to do this. Since they obviously can't visit every page on the web and decide what it should rank for and in which order they need to have another way to do this. The way they decide how to rank sites is with an algorithm that determines what the site is about and how relevant it is to the search term. Unfortunately the algorithm isn't perfect so webmasters need to help the search engines decide where their site should rank. SEO is not about gaming the system as some people think it is, SEO is about making sure that the search engines know what your site is about.

The primary way that search engines tell what your site is about is by looking for keywords. A keyword is simply the term used when somebody does a search. Not unreasonably the search engines expect the term to appear on the sites that are relevant. The algorithm looks at where the keyword appears as well as how often it appears, it also looks for related keywords. It is not just about putting the keyword in as often as you can, that used to work but no longer does, the search engines have gotten much more sophisticated. The keyword should appear naturally along with other related keywords that are related, there is a bit of art to this.

The other major factor in the search engine algorithms is how many other sites link to your site. This is used primarily to determine relevance. The search engines will assume that the best and most relevant sites will have the most incoming links. Again it is not strictly about numbers, where the link comes from is also an important factor in ranking websites. Ideally the link should come from an authority site that is related to your site. If you have a site about dog training the most valuable link is one that comes from an authority site on pets. An authority site is one that has a lot of quality incoming links itself.