What Is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is making your website and the website's individual pages visible and relevant to both search engines and search engine users. How is this accomplished?

The Basics of Good Search Engine Optimization
Good search engine optimization is very basic. A successful search engine optimization campaign will contain these essential components:

• Content. Content is what drives search engine rankings, content is what brings users to your site, and content, when sprinkled appropriately with keyword phrases, will feed search engine spiders.
• Simple Site Design. Websites that are successful in the search engine results have this in common - they are all simply designed, with optimized graphics and easy to navigate. Simple, clean web designs are what search engine spiders and search engine users alike prefer, because it enables them to get to what they're looking for; which is - you guessed it - content.
• Well-written Meta tags. Meta tags are important and are a large part of a successful strategy. They need to be organized and well written with compelling, SEO copywriting and content that will make the user click through from the search results page.

SEO Basics
Content is king on websites for both your visitors and search engines.
If you focus on nothing else, you should focus on the content of your website's pages. Search engines want to provide links to relevant pages. Search engine developers are constantly tuning their programs to read and review the content of web pages to make sure that it really is about what you say it's about.

Web Design Code must be well written.
Valid HTML (includes XHTML and XML) can help your website get spidered much more than meta keywords and meta descriptions. Don't Give Up on SEO for organic search results. SEO takes awhile to see results with. Even if you ask a search engine to spider your website or a specific page, it can take days for it to show up in the results. And if you're optimizing an existing Web page that's already in the search engine, it can take even longer for your changes to take effect.

Don't get discouraged by your immediate rankings. Remember that unless you've chosen a very unpopular search term, it can be very hard to get a top 10 ranking in most search engines. Just be patient - the results are worth the effort.