Keywording Your Way to More Traffic

Search Engine Optimization—Keywording Your Way to More Traffic

While I am not big on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) I feel it is important to cover
the basics, your site is nothing but a store in the middle of the desert. You know it’s
great, and anyone who happens to be in the middle of the desert also sees its great
features. However, until word of mouth gets around, your site is stuck in virtual limbo.
This is the entire basis of SEO theory, that you must reach out to your audience. Sure
you could take a traditional advertising approach and post a banner ad or an offline ad,
but when you do so, you are losing one of the best advantages of SEO—targeted
advertising.
Targeted advertising means you maximize your time and investment by only selling to
customers who have already indicated a strong interest in the products you sell. Enter
the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing), the only true way to reach
targeted traffic from SEO.
You target, or qualify, your audience by the keywords you focus on. Each search engine
company has a web crawler application that scours the Internet looking for fresh new
content. As the search engine finds new content, it will “index” each of the pages found,
saving the content in a large database.
At this stage, your reader types in a keyword request into the search engine and based
on this request (how it matches with text content within your webpage) the search
engine is going to send back SERPs, or Search Engine Results Pages.
What determines which websites are ranked higher than others? This is indeed a
contentious issue, as most of the major search engines are intentionally vague about
what factors their algorithms consider. Still, the overwhelming message is clear; if you
want to be highly ranked (and everyone does, since most users never even click past
the first two pages) you must develop high quality content. That brings us to the first
point of effective SEO marketing.