Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of driving traffic to a web site by designing sites and web site pages that are “search engine friendly”. This means that the pages are designed in such a way that the search engine will rank higher in the search engine listing for a given keyword or set of keywords that other sites of a similar nature. The result is that volume to these sites will then increase as a result of implementing this strategy because, in most cases, the sites at the top of the list in the search results receive more traffic than those sites that appear lower in the list.
SEO is an Internet marketing strategy that works to optimize a website by editing its content and HTML coding in order to increase the relevance of specific keywords or phrases and enhance the likelihood that the search engine will rank these pages higher than those of other web sites. The art of Search Engine Optimization is to create pages or web sites that maximize the ranking of the keyword or phrase. If the web site or page contains the keyword or phrase too many times, then the page and or web site could be penalized by the search engine as the search engine indexing algorithm concludes that the incidence of keywords is greater than that which would occur naturally.
In order to get your site ranking well on the search engines is to know your target market and then find appropriate content for the visitors who come to your site. Search engines also want unique and fresh content in order to give a good ranking to the web site. You must remember that the search engine is designed in such a way to provide searchers with relevant content that they are looking for. Look at this from the point of view of the person searching for something on the Internet. They enter a keyword or phrase into the search box and then review the results and then click through to a web site that appears to have the information they are looking for. The search engine it therefore trying to give the searcher the most relevant information based on the keyword or phrase that is entered into the search box. If that search engine does this better than another search engine then more people will use that engine to search the web. This is exactly how Google became the dominant search engine on the planet – by giving people the information they are searching for and ranking the sites on the results page in a way where the top of the list contains the sites which have the content that people are looking for.
Another strategy that employs Search Engine Optimization is article marketing. With this strategy the marketer creates articles and posts them on article submission sites. These articles contain back links to the site which you want to rank. As other sites use these articles, then the search engine finds more links back to the target site and thereby increases its ranking. Search engines use backward links to determine the relevance of a particular web site. The more inbound links a site has, the more relevant the site is determined by the search engine.