What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical to getting your website found in search engines. Understanding SEO basics will help you get your website ranked in top search results faster.

SEO should be used in all of your content, including images and videos. Did you ever notice that often images pop up when you search for a product or service? That's because the image was labeled as a keyword, versus IMG.2014.  This technique can be useful in industries that can showcase with photos, such as restaurants, painters, or landscapers, for example.

But in order to better understand how to use SEO, we should start with defining what it is a little deeper.

So what is SEO?

To put is simply, SEO is the process of getting your website found in the search engines. All of your content - text, photos and videos -  should be optimized and structured so that when someone types in a term in the search engines your page ends up in their search results.

Getting ranked on the various search engines depends on which one you are using. Google relies more on content while Yahoo relies more on link building and backlinks.

For example, if your business sells landscaping services, one method is to create content that customers are searching for online. You can use Google Keyword Planner to determine the number of searches that a particular keyword or phrase is generating.

What are Keywords?

You need to know which keywords will work for your website. These are the words or phrases that people will put into the search engine bars to receive the search engine results pages. Getting ranked for one word or two words is difficult. If you think about it, it's just too broad.

When you type in "landscaping tips," you're going to find some articles that get a lot of traffic, all from large magazines or high traffic landscaping websites. You won't be able to compete with that, so you need a different strategy.

A better option is to use a long-tail keyword such as, "how to grow grass in the shade in Tennessee."  By doing this, you significantly narrow your focus and also your competition.

Now you just create an article or video on that subject using those exact keywords in the title and the body of the article and video.

For more on using long-tail keywords versus short-tail keywords, and for tips on creating good keywords, read my article Best Search Engines.

Once your website is optimized for SEO, that's the start of getting more visitors to your website. But the process of getting found online is not as quick as just posting an article and getting found. It normally takes six months or longer to start getting found online, depending on the competition and how much visibility your website currently has. There is no way to really game this as it's a function of the algorithms of Google and other search engines.

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