What exactly is SEO and why do I need to optimize?

How many times has this question been asked? A trillion, I'm sure.

SEO is clearly the act of modifying a website to meet more closely the conditions for the algorithms of search engines.

This is true of a part of the SEO puzzle, the other big part of the puzzle is found in other sites link to you ... and preferably with anchor text that is one of the keywords or phrases.

First, the site should always be squared away and optimized. This means that using all of its encoding, and code attributes as defined by W3C (w3c.org). Code attributes are important and are great places to use a good word. The use of keywords should be more than placing them within the content of the page in the file names and descriptions of the attributes. As such, it would be better to call it logo "Logo Red Widgets" than they would call it "Logo" ... assuming red widgets is a good word for you.

The file names, and I can not stress this enough, should contain the main keyword of the page. How many times have we seen the pages that should be called something nice like "red-widgets.php" when called salespage.html or something else non-descriptive name.

The bottom line is to get your site to be met favorably by the spiders of search engines when it comes and spiders your website. The spiders classify a site by using their algorithm, which is simply a formula that seeks certain things and then scores your site accordingly. With our sample site selling widgets, the spider is to record how many times the word appears in all the widget content. It 's also going to see how many times it appears in other places, such as H1 and H2 headers, alt = attributes, title = attributes, meta tag title, tags and so on. Ideally you will have the exact number of times, and locations, to meet favorably with the algorithm. Moving on, will look for other things such as page size and a host of other factors that determined the engines to be worthy of a good web page.

Why is this important to you and why you need to optimize? I can answer that in three words. To make money! If you're reading this article is more than likely you have a business website and want to make money with it. Otherwise, you probably do not care if you show up in searches at all.

You want to get your site listed for keywords that will drive traffic to your site, and in turn, sales. It's about getting your site optimized so that you will appear in the SERP (search results pages of the engines). As a company you probably know which keywords best suited to your site. You may not realize what people are actually trying though. It pays to do keyword research, and it's worth, or to learn how to do it right, or pay someone else to do it for you. A good SEO person will use a software engine to return results that show exactly what people are looking for terms. You need to see these results to determine which keyword phrases will match your site. You have to see how qualified a person is when they come to your site. I often use the example of a search term "sneakers" in relation to "red Nike high top sneakers." Obviously the person seeking the latter is probably closer to pull out his credit card that the person simply looking for sneakers. These terms are called long tail key phrases "and are extremely important to know. Moreover, this term often fall into any web page only once get a list top. These terms often have long tails extremely low levels of competition.