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Unknown to most newcomers to the “own your own website” world, SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is one of, if not the most important source of traffic. Evidently, it is most important for small businesses and startups. Find out what exactly SEO is, and why it is important to your business.

The goal of every business is to sell its products or information to as many people as possible. No matter what its business model is, there is no such thing as a successful company without users or buyers. However, you don’t just start a website and hope visitors come in magically: it takes time, patience, and, of course, marketing (and everything that comes along with it).

Marketing can be anything from paid ads to promotional forum posts, but the one we’ll be discussing here is SEO. SEO, like the name says (Search Engine Optimization), consists of a series of changes done to both the front and back end of a website to make it more search engine friendly. The purpose of SEO is to make search engine robots find, crawl a website more easily, allowing it to climb the search results ladder. We’ll not be discussing every aspect of SEO, but instead we’ll be looking at the importance of SEO in a business. Take Amazon, for example. If you type, say, “laptop bags” at some search box, chances are that a laptop bag sold at Amazon will appear at the top results. This is because they have both good SEO and quality products (because part of SEO consists of the number of visits and back links a website gets: because Amazon has quality content and products, more and more people link to them). If you provide, for example, orthopedic chairs, your goal is to have your website appear among the top results when someone searches for “orthopedic chairs”. Good SEO is one of the main sources of potential buyers, because most internet users buy products from the websites appearing at first.

You have to keep in mind that even if you have the best SEO possible for your website, you won’t appear at the top overnight. It takes a lot of time to be at the top results, so don’t be disappointed or demoralized if you do not see glory for the first few months. After all, Google started out in a garage, and it took years before they grew so big.

So, in conclusion, why is SEO important for businesses? Because SEO brings potential customers, and potential customers become customers, and that turns into profit. Like said at the beginning, the goal of every business is to sell its products or information to as many people as possible in order to get some sort of profit. If you have quality content, products, and everything else a business should have, such as good support and service, just add some advertisement and promotion, and everything should be fine. Try searching online for SEO: the best results should appear at first.

A website is nothing without traffic and users, and getting it is harder than it looks like. Find out about the most important source of traffic, and how to take part of it, right here.

If you’ve ever done an online search through Google, Yahoo, Live, or any other search engine, you’ve probably noticed that the best results appear first. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO does exactly what its name says: it optimizes your website in order to climb up the search results ladder, and get listed among the best.

Among the things search engine “robots” look for, back linking is probably the most important and influential of all. Back links are all the links pointing towards your site found on other websites, and the bigger the linking website, the better. The more readers you have, the more back links you’ll get, because they will start promoting you on forums, or blogs.

Now, there are many ways to achieve this, and one of the most important steps to take is to revise your content. It has to be good and useful, and useful content keeps visitors interested, which in turn might become a back link from another website. Let’s see some tips that will help you out:

1.    Use descriptive, keyword-rich titles:

Descriptive titles are very useful for catching people’s attention, and avoiding unnecessary bandwidth loss. A title like “How to replace a computer hard drive easily” is much more search engine-friendly than a title like “Replacing hard drives”.  Try to use titles that are both descriptive, and keyword rich.

2.    Keywords

Keywords are also very important for SEO. To choose them correctly, you have to know what people type in the search boxes when they look for something. For example, a traveler looking for cheap hotels would probably type “cheap hotels” in the search box. Once you find out, include these words in your articles or content, making it more accessible by search engines. Also, try to use these keywords at the beginning of your post, article or piece of information, because search engine robots look for the words placed at the beginning, and they offer a preview usually composed by the first phrases. It helps catch users’ attention, thus turning into another visit.

3.    Get listed

Search engines sometimes buy information from web directories in order to have as many websites as possible. The most important directories are the Open Directory Project (http://www.dmoz.org) and Yahoo. If you get listed in the DMOZ or Yahoo, you will get listed in major search engines, including Google and Yahoo.

4.    Modifying the inside

If you use a publishing engine such as Wordpress or Joomla, there are many SEO plugins available that will modify the inner part of your website (the code, etc.) in order to make it more search engine-friendly. Search for plugins containing the word SEO in each engine’s plugin directory to find out which ones you can use.

5.     Sitemaps

Sitemaps are useful for SEO because it allows search engine robots to list every page of your website more easily. There are many plugins that will do them for you, just look around for them in your publishing system’s plugin directory.

6.    Some things should be off-limits

Sometimes allowing search engine robots crawl all over your website is not a good idea. For example, if you have a membership website, or a paid download, there is a chance people will be able to get through without paying through a search engine. This is easily prevented by using a “robots.txt” in your database that will tell search engine robots not to list that part of your website. Try searching for “how to create a robots.txt file” to learn how to do it, it’s very easy to do.

These are the most basic aspects of search engine optimization that you should be aware of, but remember that this is not all there is to SEO. There are many other things you should do, but these should be good enough to start out before getting into the more technical aspect of SEO. Also, remember that getting to the top doesn’t happen overnight: it takes time, patience, and a lot of back links.