Why Search Engine Optimization is so important

Blogging is a competetive business. You really need to give yourself an advantage by getting the proper tools and knowledge to make your site stand out from the rest. Every day, more and more bloggers are trying to get their site further up the Search Engine rankings, and if you take your eye off the ball, you may end up in the pits, along with the thousands of other failed blogging sites. For the past ten years or so, and probably for a while yet, Search Engines have been the most popular and effective way of finding sites on the web. Bloggers, and owners of other sites use SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation to try to push their sites to the top of the Search Rankings. This may sound harsh, but if your website or blog isnt appearing within the first 10 search results for appropriate keywords, then it may aswell not exist. Most people dont bother looking on the second page of search results, unless its for something very specific and hard to find. It stands to reason that you are going to get much more traffic on your site if you rank higher. The more traffic on your site, the more money you make. It is important to continually strive to make your search ranking better, through SEO techniques, or by adding to, and improving the content. So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimization to make your site number one, or maybe at least make your site generates an income. Seearch engine optimization can help you to achieve high traffic volume on your site. For instance, let's say you only get a sale from every one in 20 visitors to your shop site. If you are getting a hundred visitors per day, then your sales will be ok, but if you only get 10 to 20 hits, then sales will be poor. To re-iterate: What is the meaning of Search Engine Optimisation? Search Engine Optimisation is the utilisation of tools and techniques that will give your site a higher ranking on the search engines. Being on the first page, or even at the top of the first page will ensure that many more people will stumble accross your site, and become aware of its content. There is then more chance of your site being mentioned by word of mouth, on forums, or on social networking sites (This will further increase your search rankings). Search Engine Optimisation requires a lot of painstaking work to achieve the best results. There are many things to take into account, and changes will need to be made to your site, as well as requiring off site promotion. You will need to collate a lot of information about the keywords hat are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme. You will probably need to write the content for your site, with the keywords in mind, so that they are repeated enough throughout the text to become significant to search algorithms, yet not so much that the text becomes incongruous, or unpleasant to read. It's quite difficult to write articles with certain keywords in mind, but if you can, then aim for about 3% to 7% density. Not easy, and you will find that it's really hard for some subject matters, and not to hard for others. Keep practicing your writing, by blogging as much as possible, and you will find that the keywords will start to take care of themselves. One of the best ways of improving page ranking is by getting good quality links from other, relevant web sites. Don't be tempted to use link building farms, or black hat SEO techniques - they are being eliminated by google, and will get your site black listed. Forums are a great way to get backlinks - choose some that have similar subject matter to the content on your site, and make some postings on there, with links to your site. Try not to make it obvious that you are just doing it for the link - at least try and add some encouraging comments in your forum post or message, so that the moderator wont delete it straight away. Contact some other site owners, and negotiate with them for link exchanges (remember though that reciprocal links are not so good. It's best to rotate the links around 3 or 4 sites, so that google and yahoo dont detect the reciprocal nature of the links). Basically, the more links to your website the better. Google and yahoo wont normally penalise you for having links from bad sites (If they did, then we could all build bad links to our competetors to devalue their page rank! This would start some kind of link war). There are many great articles on SEO techniques on the web - read as many of them as you can, and bare in mind that the algorithms for the search engines are changing all the time (sometimes with quite devastating results - read about what happened to hubpages after Googles Panda algorith came online).Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimize your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding. If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimization. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good quality keyword laden content for your sites. Good luck, and may your loins be fruitful in the belly of your woman - Neil