SEO is an vitally important concept for businesses to be aware of for search engine placement in the major Search Engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN). The bottom line for any business and the bottom line of a business that conducts business on the web. SEO is designing and writing for optimum search engine placement.

Search Engines

I am only going to speak about the most important search engine and that is Google.

Why is SEO Important?

For a company to place well in the Search Engines is vital for running a profitable business. People usually won’t search further than the first page, maybe the second page and maybe they will go to the third page Google. If you are are lucky.

Search Engine Optimization is a necessity in today’s internet market. Whether you take on this job yourself, or you outsource to professionals, it doesn’t matter. Repeat after me: Search Engine Optimization is very important! Otherwise, I am wasting my time on my website. Search engine optimization is not hard to accomplish. It basically consists of tweaking and adjusting text in your site, the alt tags and the meta tags, telling the search engines what your site is all about. This ultimately shows the search engine what it needs to do to put your site in the index, and with which keywords to use when someone performs a search. There is a lot of mythical information floating around the internet in regard to search engine optimization. I will attempt to clarify that information here.

Many people believe they do not have to optimize. I’ve seen guys put up websites, make them beautiful to look at, endless trade links, and still nothing in the search engine results pages. You can believe me when I tell you that your competitors are doing it. If they do, and you don’t, you’re gonna get left behind the pack!

Many people believe it takes a long time to see results. This is just not true. Google used to update only once a month. Now, it updates regularly in short periods of time, so if you are optimizing your page for Google, you can see your results in as little as a few days! When you are doing this tweaking, you have to constantly monitor the listings for your keywords. Then you tweak a little more here and there, and then check the results again in a few days.

Many people will also believe that search engine optimization is only for computer ‘nerds’. WRONG ANSWER. Search engine optimization is for anyone who wants their site to make it to the top of the results.

There are those who believe search engine optimization is expensive, but this is only partially true. There are large companies out there that charge thousands of dollars for this service. Larger companies who need this top placement, but don’t employ those with the know how to do it, will indeed outsource this service. They make the kind of money they do, because this service works.

SEO can be quite economical though if you purchase search engine optimization tools to complete the tasks for you. Of course, any edits that need made have to be done by you, but the tools themselves can prove invaluable! If you have a blog, there are plugins you can download to do the job.

There’s frankly no doubt it requires a great deal of work to get your site optimized for the search engines, but it’s a necessary task, that once completed, needs only to be maintained to keep your rankings at levels that you are happy with.  Search engine optimization is necessary to get those organic results you hear so much about. Get yourself some good search engine optimization tools, and get to work. Soon, you’ll be enjoying the benefits of those organic search results yourself!

As you can see in the above image over 50% of the users click the first result returned by Google. Even more to that point, over 75% of the traffic goes to the top 3 results in the search engine meaning that these positions are the ones you need to be shooting for. If you aren’t placing in the top 3 you are potentially missing out on a lot of free “organic” traffic.

So I’m sure by now you are thinking how can I get into these top 3 spots and that’s a great question. There are a number of factors which influence where your site will lie within the SERPs and they can be broken down into two main categories: Internal and External.

When I say Internal, I mean things within your own site that you can modify. A few things you need to pay attention to are your page titles, meta-keywords, cleanliness of your html code and keyword use within your sites content. If you want to rank for a specific keyword you need to use it in your websites title, meta-keywords as well your website’s content.

Externally you can increase your site’s search engine ranking by having people link to your website using your keyword as the anchor text. For example, if you are targeting the keyword “dog collars” have people link to your website using “dog collars” as the link’s text. Additionally it helps if the site linking to you is related to your site’s theme.

All these factors and more can influence your website’s ranking and simply making these changes cannot guarantee a high placement in the search engines. However it’s important to make note of these things and strive for those top spots in order to drive more traffic to your site. Good luck!