Introduction to SEO

There are hundreds of thousands of websites on the internet, with hundreds more being added every day. These websites are created by businesses and by individuals, all with one goal – to be noticed; to be read; hopefully to earn an income for the site owner.

Unfortunately, many websites are never seen by their targeted audience because their ranking in search engine results is very low. Most people surfing the internet for a business or a website on a certain topic do not read further than one or two pages of search results. If a business or private website is on page 20 of the search results, it will never be seen.

For websites that are designed to do internet marketing, this is disastrous. Online marketing will not succeed unless thousands of individuals visit that particular website throughout the year. The same holds true for those personal sites who attempt to market their site with Google Adwords.

Google Adwords has a symbiotic relationship with Google AdSense. Individuals or businesses who want to drive traffic to their website write up an ad in Google Adwords, and in so doing, add a variety of keywords (that don’t necessarily show up on the ad itself). In turn, individuals who have signed up with Google AdSense place these ads on their websites – only if they match the topic of the website itself. So an individual’s website devoted to science fiction would place ads on the site for science fiction books, movies, games, and so on. If a visitor to this science fiction website clicks on one of these ads, he or she is brought to that new site, where they may purchase one or several items related to science fiction.

The percentage of people who click on an Adsense ad on a website is very low compared to the number of people who visit the site. So the keywords used must be such that it will drive more people to visit that particular website. As the website has more visitors, there is more chance that someone will click on the ad and be brought to the business website.

For a website to succeed in internet marketing, it simply must be returned on the first page of any search on any search engine. And of course placing in the top ten of search results is best of all. And these are the websites on which the Adwords/Adsense relationship works best of all, as well.

The answer to search engine placement is SEO – search engine optimization.

To optimize a website for search engines, it is necessary that certain keywords are included, both in the site’s meta tags and in the body of the site itself.

There are tools that help the writers of these websites to choose the keywords that are the most popular on a certain topic.

The search engine Google provides its users with dozens of tools to choose the best keywords for their website. (And as Google goes, so goes other search engines.) The user types a certain topic into the search field– science fiction, Chevy cars, weight loss products, and the tool will return all the phrases that searchers have used in the past that contain the search word.

Website writers then take these phrases and insert them into the text of each of the pages of their website. Sometimes they do this even if the phrase itself is ungrammatical, which is always a bad idea. Once a searcher arrives at a certain website – that website still has to sell them on the product, which will not happen if the site is poorly written or hard to understand.

SEO is important, but providing people with an easy-to-read, easy-to-navigate site is just as important.