What Is SEO - How Does Search Engine Optimization Work and How Can Your Website Benefit From It

If you've been online and have browsed various articles, blogs, forums and ebooks on building websites and Internet Marketing, I'm sure you have come across the term "SEO". Let's take a look at what SEO is and how you can benefit from it.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and the basic idea is to tweak your page and increase the amount of links that are pointing to it so that you will rank well in the search engines for a given keyword. The reason behind it is to attract plenty of long-term, free traffic from the big search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN / Bing.

For example, let's say I have a website or blog about affiliate marketing and one of my pages or blog posts is about finding a good niche. I may optimize that page for the keyphrase "best niche markets" or "how to find a niche". The goal is to then rank on page 1 of Google (and the other search engines if possible) and ideally as high up as possible. The most traffic will come from getting the number one position in Google for your keyword or keyphrase.

Some of the things I may do to optimize for that term include on page factors such as choosing a title that includes my keyword and using it a few times throughout the content of the page. I would then move to off-page optimization such as building links to this new page that include my keyword in the anchor text. Over time I should see my listing in Google move up and eventually make it to page one.

Search engine optimization takes time. You can't make a little change and expect rankings to go up overnight. It's a matter of tweaking things and building links and then sitting back and waiting for a week or two to see how your changes affect your rankings. As a rule of thumb, the more quality links with keyword rich anchor text that you can get the better.

Let's talk about why we put so much time and effort into ranking well. A page one ranking on Google (and to a lesser extend yahoo and msn/bing), can bring you quite a bit of traffic and the nice thing is that you will continue to get visitors to your page day in and day out for as long as you rank well. How much traffic you get depends on how often a given keyword is searched. You can use tools like the Google keyword tool or wordtracker to find out how often people search for a given term. Then look at who's already ranking for that term and how hard it will be to pass them to get to page one.