We live in a time in which you can literally find anything you want on the Internet. Considering the fact that there are more than 25 billion pages on the Internet distributed across more than 200 million websites, this is not surprising. But the question is: how do we find exactly what we are trying to find?

The answer is: Search Engines. These are websites designed to help people find what they need on the internet by directing them to the websites that have (or should have) the content they are seeking. If you are looking at this from a business standpoint, you certainly want your website to be ranked as high as possible on the search engine results page. This is where Search Engine Optimization, or simply SEO, comes in play.

SEO is a process that can include many different techniques used to improve the overall visibility of your website on the various search engines. If the site is optimized correctly, it will appear higher among the search results and thus will be much more likely for a random surfer to find it. Think about it – when was the last time you went to Page 5 of the search results to click on a link? Most people rarely go past the first page, and this is exactly why it’s important for your website to be search engine optimized if you want to drive targeted traffic to it.

Some of the techniques utilized by SEO experts may consist of editing a website’s source code so it will have an increased relevance to specific keywords, or to make the website easier for “crawling” by the search engines. Crawling is the process where search engine “bots” check the content of a website and rank it on their search list. Another ways of optimizing your website is building or increasing the number of backlinks pointing to it.

However this is not always as straightforward as it seems. You’ve probably experienced a situation where you are taken to a website that perfectly matches your search but has actually no content of any relation to it. The most likely reason for this is something called “black hat SEO” techniques. This is a kind of optimization that many websites use in order to improve their results and to make their Internet marketing strategy more successful. This is a method that is used to spam search engines with the use of link farms, article spinning and keyword stuffing. These websites are decreasing the reliability of the search results and make the searching experience unpleasant. This is rigorously penalized by search engines if detected so it should not be used, especially for professional websites.

As a legitimate business, you’re much better off focusing on “White Hat SEO” techniques, such as using relevant keywords and keyword analysis, link building to improve your link popularity, and content that has been written for human readers instead of the search engines. The website content should be relevant to the keywords or terms you are optimizing it for. Any website that is SEO optimized that focuses on relevancy and its organic ranking is considered to be optimized using White Hat SEO practices.

Any website can be optimized and made to show up higher on the search engine results pages. It takes a well-planned strategy and a consistent approach. It’s not simply a matter of spreading thousands of backlinks to your website over a period of a few weeks. This is not effective and may even lead to you being labeled as a spammer. It’s far better to take a consistent approach to link building, where the links grow over time and appear to be more ‘natural’. As the links pointing to your website increase over the months or even years, it will certainly continue to move higher on the results.

Author Bio: Warren Miller is the Lead Marketing Consultant for Logic Path, a ‘new media’ marketing agency that delivers customized solutions through new technologies. This includes full-service marketing solutions, search engine optimization services, membership programs, and more. Their Marketing Blog is updated daily with essential business marketing advice and tips.

Category: Internet
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