SEO, a quick guide for search engine rankings.

One of the sure ways to help your business survive in todays competitive markets, is to have a strong presence online. It’s not enough these days to just build a quick website just to get online. You need to make sure it has built in search engine optimization or SEO. Good SEO will allow your website to be seen in the search results of a search engine. Without SEO your website will probably wind up on page 568 of the search engine results for your best keywords. When was the last time you visited a website on page 3 in Google? How about page 568? Different keywords and certain phrases need to be inserted within your on page text in order to get that page listed high up in the results of the search engines. There is more to it than that, but you get the idea.

If you want to be at the top of your industry or niche, you will have to have your website well SEO’d. The best way you can get traffic is for the customer to run a search and find your website high up on the list of search results. Not only will this get you traffic, but it will be highly targeted traffic because they were searching for exact keywords. The only other way to get high rankings in the search engines is to pay for them. This is called pay per click or PPC. This type of marketing does not require SEO, but it will cost you dearly especially if your niche is really competitive. This is a subject on it’s own so I will not dwell on PPC. The bottom line is in order to get highly targeted traffic to your website, you need to be ranking highly in the search engines. Otherwise your website will go completely unnoticed, just like the other trillions of websites out there.

Unique fresh content is another part of SEO (probably the most important part). You can’t just go and copy another website and expect to get your website ranked highly in the search engines. In fact, you might not even get ranked at all if you copy another persons web pages. In order to keep your visitors coming back to your website, you will need good original and interesting content. This alone is a big part of optimization. If you are writing your content naturally and for your readers, it will also be natural SEO. There are exceptions of course, but this is what will make both your readers and the search engines happy.

The major search engines are always changing the criteria for ranking a website. The one thing that will always remain constant, is good, flowing, readable content. Search engines are in the business of providing the best available content to their users. If readers stop getting the results they are after, they will use a different search engine. If users jump to a different search engine, the loosing search engine will lose a lot of money. If you are using tricks to get your website ranked, the bottom will fall out any day now. The one constant theme for on page SEO is quality content. Good quality content will make everyone happy in the long run.