As soon as you design and build a website, no matter what the underlying purpose is, you soon will start to realize that the only way to profit from the site is if you get some visitors. And content, no matter how great, is not enough to ensure success.



Finding Your Site - Search Engine Optimization

Most sites get most of their new visitors from search engine results. People go to the search engine to find answers, and your site needs to be on the first page of the listings in order to get those people to click on your link. And Google is the main site you need to worry about since it receives more than half of the search traffic on the web today.

SEO - What Is It and How to Do It

SEO, or search engine optimization is the work you do to get your website placed highly in the search engines for the keywords that you think will drive relevant traffic to your site. SEO is usually focussed on placing a site high (on the first page) of results in Google for the most important keyword phrases for the site.

There are Two Kinds of SEO (mainly)

On site, or on page, SEO is the first type. Off site, or off page, SEO is the other type.

On Site Search Engine Optimization

On page SEO is simple the attempt to provide content on your web pages that the search engines will index quickly and will put high in the search results for your most important keywords. On page SEO is accomplished primarily through using the key words you are attempting to attract traffic from in your headlines and the text of the page.

What is Off Site Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

One word defines off site SEO - links. The search engines, especially Google, place great stock in having keyword rich links that come into your site. The anchor text for such links is the most important part of the link's structure. The most important part of the linking strategy itself is obtaining links from quality sites, especially sites that are linked by theme to your site.

Which Type of SEO is Most Important?

Unfortunately, there is no clear answer to this question. Although you can get a lot of visitors to your site with a comprehensive linking strategy, it is important that you have quality content that is related to what the visitor is seeking or else the bounce rate (the visitor clicks away from your page without visiting any other page on your site) will be high and getting the visitor to come to your site to begin with won't mean anything.

On the other hand, great content without having anyone linking in to the content will mean that your site will under perform compared to its potential.

A balanced approach to SEO will pay off the best.