How To SEO - The Basics of Search Engine Optimization

So, let's get started with a basic introduction. You have a web site, and you are looking to get more visitors to your site. The main way of attaining this is by getting people to find your site when they use a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. There are of course other ways to promote your web site, but this article will be focusing only on getting traffic from the search engines for free.

Note: Free results on the search engine result pages are typically referred to as organic results.

This is where the term Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, comes from. It can also be called Search Engine Marketing, or SEM for short. It is primarily the act of refining your web site, and information about your site in a way that is optimal for search engines to find it. Typically, the main objective is to get a top ranking in the search engine results. Search engine results are the pages that are returned from a search engine when a visitor performs a search query.

In most every search engine, ten (10) web pages are displayed that are thought of as applicable to the users search term, or keywords. The search engine determines this relevancy in a number of different ways, but the two (2) main ways are:

1. Does the content on your page match what the visitor is searching for? In other words, is it relevant?


2. Do other sites link to yours that have the same or similar topic?

These are the two main components we will discuss today. You should always keep in mind, that relevancy is the key concept for a search engine. If it fails to return relevant results, people will no stop visiting their site.

Now that we have a simple understanding of what we are trying to achieve, lets talk about how to do it. We know that we want our site to appear in search engine results. The next step is to figure out what search phrases, or keywords, our site should appear for. In other words, if your website is about bass guitars, then one of the main keywords you would want your site to be associated with is "bass guitars" as well as more narrow keywords like "bass guitars for sale", or "used bass guitars". The act of finding keywords that you want to rank well for is called keyword research.

You should spend a good bit of time up front brain-storming keyword ideas. You can also use keyword research software which can help you do this much quicker and with far greater depth than if you do it by yourself. It is highly recommended that you find one and use it.

When you do your keyword research, you will want to generate a list of keywords that are applicable to your site. Once you have built this list, you will want to break it down into logical groupings. For instance, you may see several keywords that are closely connected to each other. When you find these groupings, you should plan to build a page in your website that is committed to this topic. This is called a landing page. It can help people locate very precise topics on your website. It is also exactly what search engines are looking for... highly relevant topics to search terms.

The main idea behind a landing page is to present information about a specific topic and funnel traffic to related products on your site. See the diagram to the right.

Once you have you site's content optimized, the next step is to get other sites to link to the page's of your site. The best bet for doing this is article marketing. Again there are services out there that make this far easier than doing it by your self. When you write your articles, you will want to add links back to your site using the keywords that you researched previously. These links in essence are like a vote of popularity for your site. Make sure that you promote each of your landing pages using the most relevant keywords.

So there you go! That was a quick and dirty introduction into SEO. If you are feeling lost, don't worry about it. There are lots of resources online that can help you through it. Don't give up!

SEO is like exercise. Stick with it and don't give up. Go at a pace you are comfortable with and don't overdo it. You will eventually see results. If you quit too soon, you'll never see the benefits of your work.