The point of having an online presence is so that it can be accessed by your target visitors; therefore, search engine optimization (SEO) is important to anyone with a blog, website or online portfolio.  There are many terms that are significant to search engine optimization, but the first term to understand is SEO itself.  SEO is “the process of increasing the number of visitors to a web site by achieving high rank in the search results of a search engine”, according to the SEOmoz dictionary.  Basically, what this means is SEO makes sure that when someone types an applicable keyword into a search engine, your website appears in the results; preferably on the first page and optimally as the first result.

Mangoco, a leading Virginia SEO Company, says, “Its pretty simple… There are basic techniques to search engine optimization that anyone can apply to their website; however there is some terminology that must be understood before beginning SEO.”  The word or phrase that the user enters into the search engine is known as the keyword; this is what will get them to your website.  Crawlers, bots and spiders are the programs the search engines use to browse, analyze and index websites.  The number of people that search for a given keyword is the search volume; this may be measured on a daily, monthly or per 100 day basis.  Competition is fairly self-explanatory; the competition is the websites using the same keywords as yours that are competing with your website for the top browser spot.  Another self-explanatory term is the search engine results pages (SERPs); this is the page that comes up when a user types in a keyword.  A back link is a link from another site back to your site.  Finally, on-page optimization is the SEO methods you can apply to your site itself; this does not involve outside factors, therefore, giving you more control.

The first step to SEO is to choose keywords; make a list of all the possible keywords or phrases that your target audience could possibly come up with when searching for a site like yours; this is known as a seed list.  Next, you need to find the search volume and competition level for each of your keywords and phrases; there are some free tools available for this, however, not all of them provide information about the competition.  One recent client wanted to target her name as a keyword, “Bev Gray“.  This work was particularly easy, but targeting something like “hotels” would be much more difficult.  Many SEO beginners make the mistake of using the most popular keywords; which is not necessarily a bad thing, however, the competition uses these words as well and it may be difficult to rank high in the SERPs.  By adding some additional words to make the phrase more specific, you have a better chance at a higher ranking.

Search engine optimization is only one way to bring visitors to your website; probably the best way to attract visitors is to provide a quality website with relevant information that the visitors can use.  One might think that the more keywords used in a site the better chance you will have at a higher ranking, this is not true.  Padding your site with redundant keywords or getting many back links from inappropriate sites will make your site seem like junk and could even result in your site being banned from search engines.  SEO offers a way to enhance your site and make the site seem more available to the search engine spiders; but without quality content, the SEO you apply will not matter in the long run.