Why Mastering Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Is So Vital

Any website owner or internet marketer needs to learn how to get web traffic and initially this will cost money in the form of pay-per-click or some other form of advertising. But longer term you don’t want to be paying for internet traffic, you want people to be finding your website via the search engine results pages (SERPS), ideally on the first page.

To do this you need to either pay somebody else to do your Search Engine Optimization for you or you need to learn how to do it yourself. But once you have learnt how to do your own SEO once, you can repeat the exercise for any number of websites or blogs that you might launch in the future. So unless you have a large bank balance, it is really a vital skill that you should learn .

Learning how to get your site ranking high in the search engines is not difficult but it is time consuming and does require patience because the results are not instant.

Firstly, you need to identify what keywords you are targeting and make sure that these keywords are included throughout your site. This requires that you learn a bit about keyword research, in particular how many searches are performed each month for the keywords you are targeting and how much competition there is for those keywords.

Once you know what keywords you are targeting, SEO is then about getting as many backlinks as possible with those keywords as your anchor text. A backlink is when another site contains a link pointing to your site and the higher the Page Rank of the site pointing back to yours, the better for helping your own site’s ranking. Here are some of the main things you can do to get backlinks.

Firstly, you can submit your site to internet directories. There are software tools you can use to help you automate the submission process as submitting manually can become very time consuming. Next, you should consider writing regular articles and submitting them to article distribution sites. The articles should be relevant to the theme of your website and include a link back to your site in the resource box. Similarly, you can also write press releases about your site and submit them to press release distribution sites.

You then have the option of visiting other people’s blogs and posting comments on them. You shouldn’t promote your site directly but just include a link in the box provided. Along the same lines, you can make posts on online forums or discussion sites. Again, you shouldn’t promote your site directly but rather, you should include a link to your site in your signature. A word of caution though, if you are going to comment on forums and blogs as part of your SEO strategy you should make sure that they are DoFollow rather than NoFollow – this means that the search engine spiders will recognise the link to your site rather than ignoring it.

These are the main things you need to do to get a regular flow of backlinks to your website. The more backlinks you get, especially from high Page Rank sites, the more your site will rank in the search engines. And the better your ranking, the more web traffic you will get.