Why SEO Matters

Search engine optimization is important for every site or blog and is vital for getting targeted traffic from search engines like Google and Yahoo, yet not every site is properly optimized.  This is good news for many people creating niche sites, it means there are many sites and niches out there that are not well optomized and ranking for those sites will be a lot easier than going up against the SEO experts for the most popular search terms.

There are two different methods of search engine optimization you need to apply to start ranking well in the search engines,these are: onsite SEO and offsite SEO.

Onsite SEO

Onsite SEO relates to the changes you can apply to your site today to improve your search engine ranking, you can read about basic onsite SEO in this post SEO for beginners.

Offsite SEO

Offsite SEO relates to how your site is promoted online, the number of backlinks pointing to your site, the anchor text used in the links, the source and quality of those links and the content they are contained in. Backlinks are very important if you want to get your site listed for certain keywords and search terms.

Starting with SEO

If you are new to search engine optimization the first thing you need to do is assess your site, you can do this easily.  First think about the topic of your site, what is it about? write out a list of words that relate to your topic.  Now take a look at your URL, does your url include any of those words? what about your page titles? Your Url and page titles are some of the things that google and other search engines use to find out about the topic of your site. What about your navigation links and content? do they relate to your topic? Go through your site and make sure you are sending a clear picture of what your site is about to the search engines. If the topic of your site is not clear to you, then it won’t be clear to the search engines, or your visitors for that matter!

The next step in optomizing your site is the offsite part, many websites and companies choose to hire a search engine optimization specialist to do this part for them but you can also gain a lot of information from visiting the sites that offer these services, many will even offer a free site report (before you rush off for your free report, make sure your site is full of quality information and contains a good amount of unique content and pages)

Do as much research as you can and write down all the techniques you can use until you have a list of methods you can use to start your offsite optimization.  Keep working on both of the above SEO methods and your should start to see an increase in your organic traffic


Digg!