SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Optimizer and refers to the process in which a website is optimized for search engines to index and to rank well for a set of keywords associated with it.

For example, if you are in the business of providing web hosting services, you would want to have web hosting as one of the keywords, that when searched on, shows your website up on the first few pages of search engines. If your website ranks well in search engines, you can expect more visitors to your website and consequently, more sales. Of course, you can always advertise on Google for any given keywords. But that costs a lot of money. On the other hand, if your website ranks well within the search engine results page (SERP), it lends more credibility than an advertisement and the chances of a web user clicking on the link to your website is much higher than a paid advertisement.

Given the vast business potential that you can gain just from search results, it is no wonder that SEO has become a very important aspect of Internet marketing for the purpose of driving more prospects to your website.

Since there are so many competing websites in any given industry, how can you optimize your website so that it will rank well, perhaps even being listed on the first page of search engines like Google? By means of a series of articles, we hope to share with some essential tips on SEO, so that you can improve the ranking of your website in search engine.

For the purpose of this discussion, and for the fact that Google is the most popular search engine, we shall focus our attention on how you can optimize your website for Google.

In this article, we will focus on an overview of what SEO is and the background preparations required. Before we go into the mechanics of how we can actually optimize your website, we have to ask you some important background questions:

1. What business are you in?
2. How relevant is the content of your website for the keywords you are targeting for?
3. Who is your target audience?
4. Where are they to be found geographically?
5. Do you have a properly designed (properly structured html web pages) and completed website?
6. Where and how are you hosting your website?
7. What is the age of the domain name of your website? Does the domain contain generic keywords associated with your business?
8. Is the content of your website well-developed and informative?
   

Firstly, let's consider why Google is the most popular search engine today. Google is the most popular search engine because it returns results that are highly relevant for the keywords we are searching on. Yes, RELEVANCE is very important to Google. So if you want your website to rank well on Google, it is crucial that the content of your website must be relevant to the keywords that you are targeting for. Otherwise, Google will not rank your website well. So, when developing your website's content, ask yourself, why should it rank well in Google? Do I have compelling information in my website that will be relevant and useful to my visitors for a particular topic that they are researching on? A person who is looking to learn how to make dried flowers from roses would hardly expect to see results on where he can buy fresh roses. So, for Google to return results that is most relevant to the user, it has to device an algorithm that will be able to differentiate the kind of results it should return for "dried flowers" and "fresh flowers" So the content of your website should be relevant to the keywords that you want to optimize for. Otherwise, there is no little or no reason why your website should rank well.

So, how do you determine what keywords you should optimize your website for? If you are a florist based in Singapore, no doubt you would want people to locate your website readily if they were to search for "flowers" or "Singapore Florists" in Google. Thinking in terms of the nature of your business will help you determine the relevant keywords that you should optimize your website for. Many of us will no doubt have an idea what should be the keywords for our websites. However, even if you do not know what the suitable keywords are, fret not. You can use a free online keyword tool that will suggest to you what keywords you could optimize your website for.

Check out: http://www.google.com/sktool/# 

For example, if you key in "flowers" in the "Words or phrases" field, it will return a result showing that "wedding flowers" is the most popular search term. With that in mind, if you are a florist, and you sell wedding flowers or bouquets, then you might want to set up a page that talks about wedding flowers and the kind of wedding flowers that you are selling.

It has been said many years ago that if you want your website to be listed well in search engines, then content is king. That is still true today. Therefore, besides just showing some pictures and brief descriptions of what you are selling, it will be very useful if you would also provide additional relevant information on the product you are selling.

You will notice that we are not addressing all the questions raised at the beginning of this article. This is simply because, as we mentioned, this is an overview of what SEO is and those questions are important to set you thinking about the ground work required BEFORE you go about optimizing your website. In the next article, we will consider the types of search engine optimization that you can do for your website and how you can get your website listed in Google quickly.

If you prefer not to do SEO on your own, you might want to consider our extremely affordable SEO Packages for a Top 10 listing in Google. Best of all, with our SEO packages, you will enjoy the security of a 100% money-back guarantee!