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What is search engine optimization?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves making Web pages more search engine friendly to promote them as the most relevant solutions for the search engines’ users.
The improvements can mean the difference between achieving top rankings, which can result in thousands of monthly visitors, and being lost in oblivion.
Why is search engine optimization important?
A good SEO consultant will explain that it’s basically about following search engine rules. If your Web page fits the criterias that a search engine considers the most important factors in terms of relevance, then it will reward you with a top ranking.
SEO consultants simply modify Web pages to fit these criterias. This gives the Web pages a better chance of being selected by the search engines as the most relevant page for the search query.
The importance of keyword research
The Internet is basically a massive disorganized library. Search engines are like librarians. They both try to organize the content, so that people can find what they’re looking for without too much effort.
With books, librarians have the benefit of bibliographic databases and the information on the book covers to help them organize their library.
Search engines don’t have such a luxury. There aren’t databases of every single Web page ever created. The Internet is just too big. There’s too much information to index.
The only way a search engine can try to organize the mass of information available on the Internet is by the use of keywords and links.
It makes sense to think that if a Web page contains enough keywords related to a certain topic, it should be relevant to a search for information on that particular topic.
So part of the SEO consultant’s job is to make sure the Web pages target the keywords that people search for when looking for products, services or information related to what the Web page offers.
The variety of keywords used to search for the same product, service or information is quite staggering.
For example, here are the most popular keyword phrases used by people searching for information on search engine optimization:
search engine optimization
search engine ranking
search engine optimisation (notice the English - as opposed to American - spelling of optimization?)
search engine placement
website optimisation
search engine positioning
web site optimization (notice a space between “web site?”)
high search engine ranking
web page optimisation
search engine promotion
top search engine ranking
high search engine rankings
search engine rankings
better search engine placement
web site optimisation
high search engine placement
search engines optimization
website optimization
search engine optimizations (notice the “s” at the end of optimization?)
high search engine positioning
engine optimization resources
You notice how many different variations people use to search for information on the same topic?
The fact is, unless a page contains all of the keywords in a search query, then it will have very little of appearing at the top of the rankings.
Before Web pages can be optimized, you must conduct research to determine which keywords to target. This involves finding targeted keywords, determining their popularity, assessing the amount of competition, and then deciding which keywords to use in your Web pages.