What Is SEO? A guide...

What Is SEO?
Anyone who has spent any time marketing a product or a service on the Internet has heard the term SEO. Almost everyone knows that SEO will help them make money on the Internet by directing traffic their way but not quite so many people know exactly what it’s about. So, let’s answer the question: What is SEO?

First of all, SEO is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. In easy terms, this means that you make something so that it ranks as high as possible with the Search Engines. In other words, you want your product, service, Web site (or whatever else) to show-up when someone searches for something related to what you have to offer.

Let’s look at an example.

Let’s say you have a golf site that you sell golf clubs on. So a person might go to Google (the biggest Search Engine) and type in “buy golf clubs”. You would want to promote your site and the golf clubs on the Web using SEO so that your site would show-up when that person hits the “return” key. Furthermore, you would want to rank as high as possible.

So you would write articles, use Social Networking Sites, write blogs, and use other means to rank as high as you possibly could for those keywords – “buy golf clubs”. That way you would get more traffic to your site and you would sell more golf clubs.

Makes sense so far, right?

Now, every search engine uses what are known as “spiders”. These little guys go out all over the Internet and crawl through all the content on all the Web sites on the Internet and they come back to their Search Engine and report about that content. That’s how the search engines know which sites to list when certain words or terms are searched.

So SEO is actually taking advantage of these spiders and putting up content that will make them take your site back to the search engine and get it ranked high. But you do have to be careful.

Over the last couple of years the search engines have gotten much smarter and they now discount any site that seems to be deliberately trying to trick the spiders into ranking their site high. So don’t use the search term too often or the content you have will be thrown out altogether.

The correct way to use SEO is to put the word or term in the title of the article, the Social Networking site, the blog, or whatever else you’re creating. Then place the same words or the term in the last paragraph or toward the end. Finally, sprinkle it in a couple times throughout the page too. This will result in the spiders recognizing that your content is good and it will get that content listed when someone searches for the keyword(s) you’re targeting.

That’s a brief explanation about what is SEO. Of course, there are many other tricks you can discover in order to help you rank well with the search engines. But now at least you have a decent understanding of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.