Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is used for Search Engine Marketing (SEM). It involves things you do to get free traffic or visitors to your website from the search engines.
You do this by making your website and its pages highly relevant to search engines and to searchers, so that it can obtain top positioning, or ranking, in search engine results, for queries on relevant words or phrases.
Search engine marketing is something you can go into at great depth. Here are the main steps.
Search Engine Optimization: On-Page Criteria
On-page criteria are those that are incorporated into web pages.
Search Engine Keyword Discovery: Search engines find and display those pages that are most relevant to search queries that people enter. So it's important to center your web pages around the most effective keywords or phrases.
The most effective keywords are 2 or 3 word phrases appropriate to your business, that are most searched for, with least competition, i.e. the least number of websites with that keyword. If your business is for local customers, it's a good idea to include your city or state in its key phrases, to narrow down the competition.
Individual keywords are normally not effective for search engine optimization, as they are too competitive, unless they are unique to your business, like Nike, or Microsoft or Gap.
To find keywords or niches that are most searched for, see Niche Marketing Research page for a quick guide if you've not seen it yet.
To know how to find those with the least competition... go to the Niche Competition page.
Optimize Web Pages for Keywords: Once you've found the most effective keywords or phrases, how do you go about using them?
First, you decide, for each of your web pages, which keyword(s) it should use. You can have one, or more than one, keyword or phrase per page, but it's best not to have more than 4 or 5. Then focus the content of the web page around its keyword(s). Embed them into the content.
See MindValleyLabs' article on how to incorporate these keywords into your web pages, and how to use tags or metadata in search engine optimization, and get good Google ranking.
Create Quality Content: Having good quality content is one of the MOST important factors in search engine optimization. Search engines rank websites with quality content higher. Here's how.
A content-rich website with lots of useful information around a market niche that is in demand, attracts human traffic.
Google tracks this and counts it towards your rating. It likes such sites for raising the quality of its search results, which in turn allows it to increase advertising revenue. So over time these sites move to the front of the search engine results.
That's how a content website generates traffic for itself, and is especially useful if you find difficulty writing persuasive sales letters or 'pitching' your product. You can use it to make money from various streams, such as from your own products or services, or affiliate products, or referrals and ads.
Search engines also scan the text on your site for relevance to search queries. So write content that incorporates the keywords as prescribed above, and is highly relevant to what your visitor wants.
Quality content will become increasingly important as search engines strive to deliver quality search results. They rank duplicate content lower. (Duplicate content happens when articles are replicated, or when people scrape content verbatim from other websites.)
If you want to know how to create a successful content website, a free e-book to inspire you is SBI's Make Your Content PREsell.
Update Frequently: Some major search engines crawl sites based on how often the pages change. Updates appear to push up ranking results. So update your website frequently. Add new pages at least once a month or once a week if possible, and update existing pages.
Dead Links: Constantly check for, and fix all dead links (links which don't lead anywhere) in your website, so that search engines can crawl through and correctly index your site.
Graphics and Images: Search engines cannot read images, so be sure to include Alternative, or Alt Text tags for them. They're useful for browsers that can't display images, and for the visually impaired.
Spamming: Don't. Don't spam search engines by stuffing your site with keywords, or filling your pages with links, or submitting them several times, or creating doorway pages (duplicates of the home page but filled with different keywords). All these 'black hat' techniques will get you blacklisted by the search engines.
Search engine optimization is actually a complex subject. There are resources available that might help, such as those at Addme, which provide information and a variety of SEO tools.
If you've difficulty handling search engine optimization manually (and most people do), you might want to use one of the all-in-one SEO tools. An example is WebCEO. It helps you find the best keywords, analyzes your web pages, optimizes your site, promotes it, tracks its traffic, and maintains it. It has a (less powerful) version available free that you can download from WebCEO.
Just note that, even if you get all the factors right, it doesn't mean you'll shoot right to the top of Google. One criteria for relevancy is how long you've been online, so success on search engines won't come overnight.
But if you hang in there, optimize your pages, add lots of good content, get backlinks, and persevere, eventually your site ranking should rise.
We proceed next to the other search engine optimization steps we need to take, the off-page criteria.
