Over the last few years, search engine optimization (SEO) has been needed and used more and more, although it has been around for much longer than most people think. With new development tools being used to create websites that are heavy on Java, Flash and images, it’s important to have something that the search engines can read. If the content can’t be read by search engines then they can’t index it, and if your site doesn’t get indexed then it won’t be found when people search for it on Google, Yahoo, MSN, or anywhere else. This short tutorial will outline what SEO is, how it works, and some unethical SEO methods that you should avoid.

What is SEO?

SEO is a way of analyzing your site and modifying it to allow search engines to read and index it more easily. SEO is all about maintaining and building websites that get ranked highly on the major search engines.

You see, when people use a search engine, they generally don’t look beyond the top 20 or so results. If you want to make any money from your website, you need to get ranked in the top 20 out of potentially hundreds of websites.

How Does SEO Work?

Search engines maintain a huge database containing information from individual websites. Most of the information search engines collect isn’t listed on their results pages, but it is taken into consideration when it comes to deciding those results’ rankings.

It is very important that you encourage the search engines to rank your website in a high position, and you can do this through the keywords that you use on your website, as well as when you submit it. If the keywords you use in your submission tool don’t match the ones on your site then you could harm your rankings - be sure to have all the keywords you want to use on the website itself before you submit it.

Most websites don’t focus on their topic well, and so keyword lists containing 50 or more phrases per page are recommended. By focusing some of the pages of your site on keywords, you will score higher with the search engines.

Free Search Engines.

The major search engines on the Internet are still free, and it’s not hard to take advantage of this free advertising - you can do it in as little as an hour.

If you have just put up a website, you probably all ready have heard words like: keywords, Google Adwords, Google Adsense, SEO. Adwords, Adsense, SEO have one thing in common - Keywords. How important are keywords? Very Important. Google Adwords

Adwords, be it through Google, Miva, or any pay-per-click search engines, you need keywords. With Adwords, you create a three-line ad - 25 word title, with two 35 word lines of ad copy - then you create your keywords. To get the hits, you have to brainstorm for different keywords, that are different but relevant to your target audience. Sound easy? It’s not. It takes time, patience, constant tweaking, and hoping that the product you are selling is not already saturated — to much competition, makes it a little more difficult for the novice to make a profit.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense is an advertising program created by Google, and which is beginning to be explored by other search engines, such as Yahoo and MSN - that allows you to put targeted ads on your website. If someone clicks on the ad, you earn a small amount of money. These ads are keyword driven and are relevant to your webpage or website.

Sounds simple? Well, not really. There is more too it than just putting an ad on your website and expecting someone to click on it. What’s involved? Let’s see - color, position, style, to name just a few.

SEO

Search engine optimization - this for me has been a time-consuming process - since I am still learning. SEO is keyword driven - the search engines pull the keywords from your web copy - not, to my surprise, from the meta keywords tag. Granted, I still use the meta keywords tag, but maybe in the near future, I will slowly eliminate the tag from my webpages… The search engines do, however, pull information from Meta Description, Meta Title, and the content of your webpages. Thus, content does reign supreme.

Since content reigns supreme, each page should contain useful content and most importantly, your most relevant keywords that you want to emphasize. Secondly, it is best to try and base your keywords around a central theme. I have found that when the keywords diverts away from the main theme - that sends a red flag to search engines. So, if you want to look at your keywords and the density of the keywords on your webpage or webpages.

To conclude, keywords is one of the main ingredients that leads people to your website, product, service and/or ad. …AND, keywords based around your quality content will help with your positioning on your website.