What Is Website SEO?

Starting up a website isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. After all, you either have to learn how to completely design one from scratch or pay someone to do it for you. You have to find a good host and you have to fill your website with good content. As you are setting up your website, you will probably came across the phrase “SEO” time and time again and you may not have any idea what it is and why people are so adamant that it’s the key to success.

Those people are telling you the truth. The way to make your website successful is to use SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. The process is exactly what it sounds like: a way to optimize your website so that search engines find them quickly and easily. The faster a search engine finds your website, the more traffic you’ll receive, and without traffic a website can never survive.

When someone types something into a search engine, that phrase is known as a keyword. With millions of websites to search, the search engine then uses that keyword as a guide to check different websites and return results. So, naturally, the only way for it to find your website is for your website to have a keyword.

What should your keyword be? Think of what your site is about and sum it up in a few words and that should be your keyword phrase. If it’s all about medieval history, that’s your keyword. Now, where you actually place the keyword is the real key to search engine optimization.

First, make sure that your keyword is included in the title of your website. Not only will the search engine find it faster, people are much more likely to visit your website if it has what they want in the actual title. You should also buy a domain name that includes your keyword as well for the same reasons – search engines love it and so do people using them!

Next, make sure your keyword is included in the actual content of your website. Search engines not only check the titles and URLs of websites but they search the actual site, and when they return the results of their search, they often pull an excerpt that contains the keyword in it. So if your medieval history website includes a sentence that goes, “Medieval history spans several hundred years…” then not only will the search engine pull up the title of your site and its URL, it will include that sentence as well because it has that keyword in it! However, remember that the further apart the keywords are, the less effective they are; the above sentence is much more effective than a sentence that says “History in the medieval times…” The closer the words are to each other, the more search engines like them.

Another great way to use SEO if you’re marketing a product is to include what’s called a secondary keyword. For instance, if you’re selling homes in San Jose and you only include “realtor” in your site’s content, you’re competing with thousands of other websites who have that same keyword. But if you narrow to down a bit by including “San Jose realtor” then your chances of getting traffic is much higher!

One of the fastest ways to get traffic for your website is to make sure it’s as easy to find as possible, and using SEO is the perfect way to do that.