Search engines now represent a major method of Internet access for many users. These search engines allow users to enter words or phrases (known as key words), and then yield a list of websites relevant to those key words. With the huge growth in size and complexity of the Internet, the power and convenience that search engines offer have quickly grown to become one of the best ways to browse the Web.



Because of this, many webmasters have realized the importance of formatting their web pages properly, in accordance with how search engines work. Getting more visitors (known collectively as traffic) is every webmaster's goal, since the success of a given website is usually proportional to the size of the audience that it reaches. The means and methods of making a given site or page more accessible and attractive to search engines is now known as search engine optimization, or SEO. Here we discuss some of the basic concepts, which are keyword selection and search text improvement.

Since search engines operate mainly around keywords, webmasters must have a firm grasp of how they work. Search engine optimization bases itself on a set of target keywords, for which it is desired that the website appear on search listings. For instance, a computer dealer might want to get listed higher up for the keywords ?online computer sales?.

The previous example actually is also an example of a not-so-good keyword choice. The rule of thumb is to choose relevant keywords that are as specific as possible to your website. Relevance of course refers to how related your target keywords are to the actual content of your webpage. Think about it: if your website is optimized for keywords that are totally unrelated to your content, the visitors you receive might turn out to be not interested in your website, after all!

Specific keywords, on the other hand, are desirable because of the huge amount of competition for more general keywords. There are millions upon millions of websites on the Internet, and the more general keywords would be relevant to a larger portion of these websites. By choosing more specific keywords, you would be able to narrow down the competition and be better able to optimize your website effectively.

After creating a list of good keywords, it is time to actually improve search text, or that is, the text within your web pages. The important thing to remember here is to actually use your target keywords within your body text. Edit your existing text, if necessary, to incorporate as many of your keywords as you can, up to a certain extent.

Keyword density refers to the frequency of occurrence of a particular keyword, and a good figure to shoot for would be 8 ? 10%. Any higher than this and there is a chance that the page would be marked simply as spam by search engines. And besides, at that point the sheer repetition of keywords has a good chance of making the body text sound unnatural! That is why it is important to think about right keywords.