If you are new to the world of owning and operating a website, chances are you have been wondering how to get your site noticed. You want to know how to get your site to show up on the search engines-and not after scrolling down through 100 pages, either. You would love for your website to pop right up at the top of the list whenever anyone searches for a term relevant to your site’s contents. In other words, you need to learn about SEO.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a process through which a website is reorganized in order for it to be at its ultimate best so that it will attract more traffic to the website. There are dozens of different SEO techniques, and they are all designed so as to help draw more clients or customers to a website.

SEO Basics

While there are many advanced SEO techniques that can be learned-and, in fact, many webmasters pay experienced SEO professionals to implement these techniques on their behalf to save time-there are several basic methods that you can work on yourself. These strategies may seem rather ordinary; however, they will help your reputation in the online world…and this will help your website to rise in the search engine rankings. Give these ideas a try (if you haven’t already):

Provide professional, well-written, unique content on a regular basis. Without doing this, people have no reason to want to return to your website. Content is the most important part of any website.
Work with a good designer to make sure that you have a clean, easy-on-the-eyes look for your website. Or, if you choose to design the look of your site yourself, make certain to have several other people look it over. Choose people who will give honest opinions about the website design.
Test everything on your website. Go through and check all of your links-every single one-to make sure that they work. Try leaving yourself a comment or sending yourself an email. If there is something that doesn’t work on your site, you need to find out and fix it. (This is also a good job to delegate to someone else.)
Use keywords for your links. Don’t say “Click Here”-instead, hyperlink the keyword name. You can turn any word or phrase into a link when writing.
Keywords and SEO

One of the most important ways for you to work on with SEO on your own is to work with keywords. You will need to start doing keyword research. This involves a few steps:

Find a keyword research tool online (you can try Wordtracker or Overture).
Search for terms relevant to your website.
Choose to write about terms that received a high number of searches, yet that few sites are using.
If you follow those steps, you will get that high number of searches headed toward your website since not many websites have focused on those terms.