SEO – What is it, and why does it matter?
If you have a website you have to be familiar with the concept of SEO or search engine optimization. Without there will be few visitors to your site since they will not find your site in the search engines. There are of course other ways that you can get visitors but the best option is to get them from the search engines since these will be the ones most interested in the content of your site.
Search engine optimization is the process of getting your website to rank as high as possible in the search engines. In theory this should happen naturally and the sites that are the best and most relevant should be the ones that rank at the top. In practice there is a lot of room for manipulation and it is something that you are going to have to do if you want people to find your site on the search engines. You can be sure that your competitors are going to be doing it so you will have to do it as well.
The obvious reason that you are going to want to make sure that your site is optimized for the search engines is so that you will get traffic. There are thousands if not millions of other pages competing for rankings in the search engines and if your site is not on the first page very few people are going to see it. Very few people will search beyond the first page and in reality the first couple of results will get the vast majority of traffic. Clearly your site needs to be ranked as near to the top as possible.
Of course you don't want just any traffic to your website; you want people who are interested in what you have to offer. This is especially true if you are selling a product on your site, you want visitors who are interested in buying what you are selling. This is something that SEO can help you with. The goal is to get your site ranked at the top of the search results for the right terms to get the visitors that you want. Done correctly the vast majority of people who come to your site should be there specifically because they are interested in what you are offering.
There are several steps in the SEO process; the first is to determine just what search terms to get your site ranked for. The next thing that has to be done is to make sure that the content of your site is optimized for these terms. The biggest part of the job however is in getting links from other sites pointed towards your site. For the most part how well your site ranks will depend on how many links are pointing at your site and where they are coming from.