Search engine optimization is often seen as the art of knowing what search engines look for so that you can give it to them. The truth is, though, that it's just as much a matter of knowing what your customers or audience is looking for as it is playing to the search engines. SEO is more than sprinkling a handful of keywords liberally over your pages. So if it's not just tossing in a bunch of keywords, what IS SEO?
For starters, keywords ARE important. After all, that's how your customers will find you. If you have a pet store, for instance, is ‘pets' really the best keyword for you to use? A good SEO strategy will help narrow your keywords to bring you – not the MOST traffic – but the most effective traffic. Targeted traffic is what you ultimately seek, not garbage traffic. Try out our suggest keyword tool for an effective way of preparing your keywords.
Once you've chosen keywords, you have to decide where to place them on your pages. Is it better to have a page for each breed of puppy you sell – or to list all the breeds on one page? A good SEO practitioner will know the right answer. Here's a hint: place relevant keywords near the top of any copy text located on a page.
Beyond keywords, an SEO project should include optimizing your site structure, as well as the links to and from your web site, what's in your header tags, how many alt tags with descriptions put on your pages – in fact, the factors that affect how the search engines rank your page change constantly. Because the search engines constantly adjust their algorithms to account for new information, your SEO strategy must also be an ongoing process that evolves along with the changes in the search engine technology.
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