Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of enhancing the volume and quality of site traffic for a particular website or a single web page by search engines. SEO targets free traffic and not paid traffic or direct traffic. It is basically a long term advertising strategy. While it is not necessary to do SEO “on the job” at any cost, you must understand and know how to optimize your website, blogs and other online properties so that they rank well for relevant keywords on the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and Bing.
Before you begin using SEO, it is important to understand what exactly the search engines look for in terms of keywords. Keywords are essentially words or phrases that searchers use to find what they are looking for when they type a search term into the search bar of a search engine. So, a high quality SEO strategy should make sure you choose relevant keywords as much as possible.
For example, let’s assume you are searching for “pizza restaurants”. You would want to include some sort of phrase in your keywords to attract more search traffic. So, for our example, we would write “pizza restaurants” in our search bar keyword. As you can see, the pizza restaurant keyword phrase can consist of several words. However, if those words are not related, or too general, then they will be useless.
If you use too many irrelevant keywords, the search engines will not find them. They might just return unrelated pages. Thus, when someone types in our keyword phrase “Pizza restaurants in New York”, they would most likely get a page with lots of irrelevant keywords. This would probably lower their interest in our website. Therefore, we should choose keywords carefully and use as few as possible.
Another way to reduce keyword wastage is to target your SEO strategy towards long-tail keywords. This means that these keywords are more specific and less generic. For example, a search for “car dealers in Chicago” is very specific and targeted. It’s definitely not a good idea to target this keyword to anyone and everyone who has a car.
Also, you can find more keywords by using other optimization techniques such as directory submissions, article submissions, social networking, etc. However, none of these strategies can give you the benefit of targeting long-tail keywords. Keywords are extremely valuable because they help you in ranking better in Google. They are also used by the PPC ads on Google. In fact, if you advertise a product or service in Google without using keywords, you will not get much business. So, spend wisely when you choose your keywords and get optimized for them.