What's SEO

by Anders Fredriksson

SEO or Search Engine Optimization in short means to make your website more attractive to search engines. This is done by a number of ways and I will mention the very basic things in this article.

A search engine and a person doesn't exactly see the webpages the same way and there are things on the page that are supposed to only be read by the engines, one of these things are the meta tags. In the meta tags you can put things like keywords and description.

First off all you need to research what keywords are relevant to your site, but seeing as you started the site up already, you probably have quite a good idea about this. If you haven't started the site yet and you are intending to make a site about a niche, just with the intention of making money, reseach will be good. And if this is the case, you might want to look into how possible it is to get a domain name that have the keywords in it. Keyword rich domain names will help your listings on certain search engines since extra weight might be put into the fact that the things people search for show in your domain name.

When you optimize your site for search engines you want to make sure you use the keywords in your title tag, the meta tags, possible image alt tags and of course in the content of the page itself. However, don't overdo this. Trying to build pages only for search engines and not for people will most often just hurt you in the long run. I believe it is John Chow (of JohnChow.com) who once wrote that he always puts people first and Google second. To me, this makes a lot of sense. It´s the visitors who should come first and then the search engines.

That said though, you should always make sure you have your most important keywords mentioned here and there on the site.

If you are a blogger and you are able to install plugins on your blog, I would like to take the moment to suggest a plugin called All in one SEO. With this plugin you can edit the title of each post as well as add keywords and descriptions to the posts.