Da SEO Journal

Search engine optimization is all about traffic generation, which will eventually lead to profits for your business. Advertising costs are rising higher and higher every day. Driving traffic to your site by utilizing search engine optimization is a form of free advertising provided by the major search engines. The trick is to know how to optimize your web pages to make them as search engine friendly as possible. To do this you must have a good understanding of how search engines operate. Search engines are web pages set up in such a way that the user can input search criteria in order to have the search engine return results based on that criteria. Search engines then employ “spiders” or web crawlers to move across every page on the internet and find the most relevant and useful information and return those links to the user. It is important to note that the search engines do not return website addresses. They return web “page” addresses. One page of your site might be relevant while another may not. The search engine will provide the user with the direct link to the page of your site that meets the search criteria that they input.

So, the next thing to understand is how the search engines decide what is relevant and important. Search engines use ever changing algorithms, or mathematical statistical analysis, to look at a site and determine whether it is worthy of a ranking and how high that ranking should be on their search engine listings. One of the criteria in this analysis is keyword phrases and their placement throughout the website. Working alongside of those keywords are the internal links of the website.  The internal links are important to the keyword placement because they serve as a roadmap for your website. Think of your website as a tunnel and each individual page as a section of that tunnel. Your tunnel needs to be one long path that takes the web crawler through your entire site.  If your tunnel has many branches leading in many different directions, the web crawler will become confused and frustrated, and it will rank your site low on its ranking because there was no ease of navigation. Your internal links are related to your keywords because as the web crawler moves through your site, it is searching for information that it feels is important. Your keywords and keyword phrases will be the main clues for the web crawler as it moves along.

Keyword density used to be a big focal point for search engine optimization. It is not so much anymore. Most search engines no longer look as much for keywords as they do for good, relevant content. Your content should be clear vocabulary that makes the subject of that page obvious to both the search engines and the reader visiting the page. The biggest thing to remember is that the search engines are the tools that will drive the most traffic to your site. The benefits of search engine optimization and the amount of revenue you will generate by doing it cannot be emphasized enough. Your website will be made or broken by your choice of website design and content, and the amount of time you spend on search engine utilization.